THE LIFEl 




SAMUEL V- COLE 




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Book ,Gft %5 

Copyright N° ' ■ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 



THE 
LIFE THAT COUNTS 

BY 

SAMUEL VALENTINE COLE 

PRESIDENT OF WHEATON SEMINARY 




NEW YORK 

THOfMcAS r. C%OWELL & CO. 

PUBLISHERS 



J4*Ti 



COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 



PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1905 









f wo Oopies iteceMW I 

SEP 28 »90b 






D. B. UPDIKE, THE MERRYMOUNT PRESS, BOSTON 



■ 



TO THE DEAR MEMORY OF 

MY MOTHER 
WHOSE LIFE OF GENTLENESS 

AND 

SELF-SACRIFICING SERVICE 

HAS LAID ON ME A DEBT OF GRATITUDE 

THAT CAN NEVER BE REPAID 

I DEDICATE 

THIS LITTLE BOOK 



CODipENjS 



INTRODUCTION IX 

BURNING LAMPS AND COALS OF FIRE 3 

THE FACE OF A MAN 1 7 

THE FACE OF A LION. I. 31 

THE FACE OF A LION. II. 45 

THE FACE OF AN OX. I. 59 

THE FACE OF AN OX. II. 7 1 

THE FACE OF AN EAGLE. I. 85 

THE FACE OF AN EAGLE. II. 97 

LOSING AND FINDING 109 



^ 

iNr<i{OT>ucrio^ 



^ HAT counts is the good life; there is no other worth 
living. But whatever is good is good for something 
beyond itself; goodness in the abstract, goodness iso- 
lated and unrelated, does not exist. Goodness implies a 
goal y an objeft, a something on which to expend its 
energy. The good life is the life that reaches out, that 
fulfils itself in ministration to other lives. The life 
that counts is the life that serves ; the life that counts 
most is the life that serves most. 

Service has many forms : to lead an army in free- 
dom s behalf, to help shape beneficent laws, to open 
new fields of industry > to invent an implement that 
lessens toil y to add to the literature of a people, to 
preach righteousness by word or example, to inspire 
other lives to their best efforts, to mitigate the suffer- 
ing or increase the happiness of men, — to do any of 
these things is to serve. But this by no means ex- 
hausts the list: to earn one's daily bread, to keep the 
home, to train up a child, to give a cup of cold water, 
to speak a kind word, to endure the reverses of for- 
tune with a brave heart, to receive graciously the 
ministration of others when you are powerless to min- 



x INTRODUCTION 

ister to them, — these \ too, are forms of service that 
sweeten life and benefit the world. 

What service is greatest no man may know ; for 
none can disentangle the threads of particular a£ls 
from the complicated texture of cause and effect and 
discover the far-reaching influence of little things. 
And it must also be borne in mind that oftentimes 
service consists not so much in the achievement of 
results as it does in an attitude of spirit. The poets , 
with their clear discernment, confirm us in this. 

"'Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man 
Would do," 

says Browning; and Milton in his blindness found 
comfort as he remembered, 

"They also serve who only stand and wait." 

It follows, then, that every man, woman, or child, 
at all times and under all circumstances, may lead 
the life of service and therefore the life that counts. 
It is always a question of willingness. 

This little book deals with some aspects of service, 
but chiefly with certain qualifications of the life that 
would serve. The truth it contains is not new. The 
good life, the life that serves other lives and counts 
for something in the world, has been essentially the 
same in all ages. The great principles of conduEl and 
character were long ago set forth in proverb, par able, 



INTRODUCTION xi 

and vision, and will never wear out. The truth in 
them is as old as the stars and as fresh as the morn- 
ing light. 

The chapters of the book — with the exception of 
the last, which describes, more particularly, the spirit 
that true service requires — derive their titles from 
the phraseology found in the Bible account of Eze- 
kieFs Vision. A portion of the Visions symbolism, 
though drawn upon so slightly here, is singularly ap- 
plicable to the conditions of modern life. 

It may be added^ as explaining the style of expres- 
sion here and there employed, that these nine chap- 
ters grew out of addresses given before young people 
with a view to stimulating their aspirations for use- 
ful living. If in their printed form they should 
prove helpful in any way to other lives , the book will 
have achieved its aim. 



THE LIFE TH<AT COUNTS 



<BURNINg LtAMPS ^NT> 
COALS OF FI<I{E 




HERE is a well worn but never- 
to-be-worn-out bit of wisdom 
which declares that whatsoever 
your hand finds to do you should 
do it with your might. Whole- 
heartedness, concentration, zeal, 
enthusiasm, energy, — these are 
magic words in the vocabulary of adtion.The man 
who is earnest will accomplish more with half the 
truth and only one talent than the man who is in- 
different will accomplish with the whole truth and 
ten talents. "I would accept at any time," says 
President Tucker of Dartmouth College, "the 
moral result of serious thinking upon the infe- 
rior subject in place of less serious thinking upon 
the greater subjedt." We would rather hear a se- 
rious talk on butterflies than a flippant talk on 
religion. The laws of the universe put a great pre- 
mium on whole-hearted devotion to the thing in 
hand. Dowieism, Mother-Eddyism, or any other 
ism that gets complete hold on a person, no mat- 
ter how foolish it seems to other people, is not 
so much a spe&acle to be laughed at as a phe- 
nomenon to be studied. It shows how far a little 



4 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

truth will go when it has the backing of sincer- 
ity and unlimited zeal. With people who fail the 
trouble is, nine cases out of ten, that they make 
a "halfway covenant'' with life; they divide the 
current of their energies ; they set their face toward 
many directions, but steadfastly toward none; 
they have purposes enough, but not enough of a 
purpose; the whole of the man never goes into 
any ad:, whereas it ought to go into every ad:, 
whether the ad be driving a nail or negotiating a 
treaty. Better than having a purpose is to let the 
purpose have you. 

Consider, for example, the value of concentra- 
tion if there is anything to be done. When the 
cruiser New York visited Germany at the open- 
ing of the Kiel Canal, Emperor William was one 
day entertained on board at dinner. On a sudden, 
according to a newspaper report, he asked the 
captain how long it would take to clear the ship 
for adion after the order was given. "Three min- 
utes," replied the captain. "Would you mind 
giving the order now?" rejoined the emperor. 
The order was given, the emperor took out his 
watch, and in less than the stated time the ship 
was transformed into the attitude of war. Such 
was the discipline, and such the arrangements 
throughout, that every man could be at his post 
and all the powers of the ship be centred on a 
common objed at once under the guidance of a 
single will. That was concentration. It is what 
would tell in time of adual war. A power similar 
to that is needed in a person's life. It is amazing 



<BURNINq LAMPS, &c. 5 

how long it takes us sometimes to clear for ac- 
tion when we have nothing more important to 
do than write a letter; and after we have entered 
on a task, we are apt to waste our energy in side 
streams of effort, leaving the main current to 
move at a sluggish pace. 

There are some ads which everybody recog- 
nizes as requiring the whole man to the very last 
fibre. When a surgeon performs a delicate opera- 
tion, he has no business to think of his reputa- 
tion, or of his sick wife, or of the epidemic that 
rages, or even of God and his own soul; he must 
think of the one thing he is doing and of no- 
thing else, or the result will be disastrous. When a 
lion-tamer enters a cage of wild beasts, he leaves 
the world and all its interests outside; for the 
time being they do not exist; if he shows by a 
false step or the quiver of a muscle that his at- 
tention is elsewhere, or that he does not hold all 
his energy at a focus for instant use, he stands 
on dangerous ground. And it is much the same 
with any man in dealing with those other wild 
beasts we call circumstances in life; they get the 
better of us the moment we fear to look them 
in the eye. 

But there can be no real concentration unless 
the man has an objed and is dead in earnest 
about it. It is the earnest life after all that is 
needed most. If you should visit the power-house 
where they generate the eledricity that lights 
the town, you would find there a switchboard 
on which two kinds of registers are set. One kind 



6 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

measures what is called the amperage, or amount 
of eledtricity used, and the other measures the 
voltage, or intensity of it. The light that comes 
does not depend on the amperage; the amount 
of eledxicity may be large or small ; the light 
depends on the voltage; that must be kept al- 
ways at the lighting point; intensity and not 
quantity produces light. It is something like that 
with persons. Ability may be great or meagre; 
ability is only the amperage. But look at the 
earnestness of a man's life; that is the voltage 
and determines the light. A man may be able to 
do many things well and yet lack earnestness 
enough to do anything sufficiently well to shine. 
When Jesus said to his disciples, "Ye are the 
light of the world," he did not refer to any great 
amount of truth which they possessed — they 
were unlettered and ignorant men — but he re- 
ferred to the earnest way in which the truth was 
held; they had left all for the kingdom of hea- 
ven's sake. 

The earnestness with which a thing is said or 
done invariably carries weight. It is what we look 
for first. So long as a person is in earnest his in- 
fluence is secure. This was the secret of much of 
Mr. Gladstone's success. It used to be said that 
when he was making a speech in the House of 
Commons you would think that the subjedt he 
talked about was the one chief interest of his life. 
And so it was for the time being. He threw him- 
self into it in so earnest a way as to give point 
to the humorous remark that he could impro- 



VURNINQ LAMPS, &c. 7 

vise a lifelong convidtion more effectively than 
any other human being. If you susped: that a 
person does not mean what he says, or takes no 
great interest in it, though you know he says the 
absolute truth, the influence of his words is gone. 
Earnestness is the life blood of all speech that is 
intended to convince or sway the minds of men. 
It carries a man forcefully forward to the objedt 
in view in spite of the intervening obstacles. 
" When the English language gets in my way/' 
said Beecher, "it doesn't stand any chance." 
"My verb has lost its nominative case/' said 
Father Taylor, "but I 'm bound for the king- 
dom." The lions and rocks that block the path- 
way of the half-hearted person become only 
phantoms and shadows as the earnest man ap- 
proaches; he walks diredtly through them. 

History, speaking from its vast area with a 
thousand voices, declares that the most potent 
force in every great movement is not the tramp 
of armies, nor the decrees of councils and cabi- 
nets, nor the splendor of thrones, nor the glitter 
of gold, nor the creations of intellect; the most 
potent force, the inevitable fa&or, is the moral 
earnestness behind some purpose in the heart of 
an individual man. That is the way in which Con- 
fucius has ruled China, the Buddha has ruled 
India, Socrates has ruled Greece, and Jesus Christ 
is to rule the world. Paul was known as a tent- 
maker, Peter as a fisherman, Columbus as a 
sailor, Luther as a monk, Cromwell as a farmer; 
and yet what largeness of purpose, what tre- 



8 THE LIFE TH<AT COUNTS 

mendous earnestness, what mighty achievements, 
those names represent! The young woman whose 
career shines across French history as that of 
Joan of Arc was deemed a worker of miracles 
in her day. Without friends, or influence, or ex- 
perience, only a peasant girl whose employment 
was the tending of sheep, she burst from her ob- 
scure home determined to do what all the men 
of France together had proved themselves in- 
competent to do. She rallied the discouraged 
armies of her country, led and inspired them on 
many a field, raised the siege of a great city, 
turned the tide of war, and restored the king to 
his throne. And for generations afterward, it is 
said, every time a regiment of soldiers passed 
through the little village of Domremy, where 
she was born, it used to halt and present arms 
in honor of her memory. How can we account 
for such a career? It is the same story — enthu- 
siasm of faith, earnestness of purpose, indomi- 
table will. Why the weak things of this world 
overcome the things that are mighty is no se- 
cret now. 

The question is sometimes asked why the 
Church with its enormous wealth, its splendid 
traditions, and its great soul-inspiring truths does 
not impress itself more strongly on the world. It 
never had greater opportunities, or engaged in 
wider activities, or touched more of the interests 
of life; and yet its grasp on the multitude seems 
comparatively feeble. The reason is that spirit- 
ual power has not kept pace with material gain; 



BURNINg LAMPS, &c 9 

the amperage is large, but the voltage is low. 
Most of the people you meet nowadays are not 
so obviously aglow with moral earnestness as to 
remind you of burning lamps and coals of fire. 
The zeal of the Lord's house, or the zeal for 
truth and righteousness and goodness anywhere, 
in politics, or in literature, or in education, does 
not seize hold of men with anything like the 
vigor which may be described, in the Bible phrase, 
as a zeal that eats one up. We frequently think we 
need more truth, when what we really do need is 
more earnestness in using the truth we already 
have. The world needs a more liberal sprinkling 
of persons who are willing to be eaten up in the 
good cause. All progress depends on self-sacri- 
fice; every step of the way has cost somebody 
something more precious than gold. The men 
and women who make the world better may dif- 
fer in wealth, in education, in ability, in oppor- 
tunity; but the one thing they possess in com- 
mon is the earnest spirit; they take life and its 
duties in a serious way; their voltage is high. 

The frivolous, purposeless lives of this world 
are like ships at the mercy of wind and tide. 
Hail one of them and ask, "Whither are you 
bound? " and the answer will be, "I don't know." 
" What cargo do you carry ? " " Nothing." "Well, 
what are you doing out here on the ocean of 
life ? " " Only drifting/' " Ah ! but you don't know 
what a sorry spectacle you make — only drifting 
when there is so much to be done." It is said that 
Carlyle, on one of his daily walks, met a young 



io THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

man, and, falling into conversation with him, in- 
quired about his purpose in life. "I haven't any 
particular purpose," came the reply. "Then get 
one," exclaimed the stern old man, striking his 
cane on the pavement, — "get one quick." 

The president of an educational institution, in 
addressing a company of ministers in Boston on 
student life, divided college students into three 
kinds, and used for illustration an incident of his 
experience. During a visit to Japan, he stood on 
the wharf one day waiting for a steamer and hap- 
pened to excite the curiosity of a laborer who was 
wheeling freight. The coolie, as he passed with 
his load, looked up and said in his pigeon Eng- 
lish, "Come buy cargo?" meaning to inquire if 
the stranger had come out to Japan on commer- 
cial business. Receiving a reply in the negative, 
he framed a new question and said, as he passed 
the second time, "Come look an' see?" by which 
he meant to ask if the stranger was a tourist who 
had come to see the country. Not yet getting the 
information he wanted, he conjectured one more 
motive, and, the third time he trundled his bar- 
row by, the question was, "'Spec' die soon? "that 
is, was the stranger there for his health? 

This incident, used for describing the motives 
that lead young men to college, is capable of a 
still wider application ; it describes three classes of 
persons who are with us everywhere and always. 
Some persons seem to have entered our planet 
for their health. Why they should have selected 
this particular world for such a purpose is be- 



VURNINq LAMPS, &c. n 

yond my comprehension. But here they are. Of 
course I do not mean that they are physically ill 
or weak. I mean that they announce themselves, 
by every sign and motion, as having arrived to 
be coddled and waited on; they are leaners, and 
they lean heavily; they contribute nothing to 
the world but their burdens for other people to 
carry; they insist that everything shall be made 
comfortable for their precious selves; that is what 
the world is for; whatever irks, or is unpleasant, 
or requires their exertion, must be put far away 
or kept out of sight; they will perhaps talk of 
flowers and stars and literature and art; they are 
fond of fine sentiments; they wish you to under- 
stand that they are very highly organized beings 
and that the parlor of life is none too good for 
them ; they have feelings; what they say or do de- 
pends on the way they feel ; and they have a good 
time, these parlor boarders; but when they retire 
from life they leave the world not one whit better 
than they found it for aught they have done. 

I wonder if Walter Savage Landor knew what 
a selfish-looking creature he was painting in those 
four famous lines of his: 

"/ strove with none, for none was worth my strife; 
Nature I loved, and, more than nature, art; 
I warmed both hands within the fire of life : 
It sinks and I am ready to depart" 

St, Paul never sat by the fire of life and warmed 
his hands while others did the work, not he ! He 
was out gathering fuel. What these people need 



12 THE LIFE TH<AT COUNTS 

who sit by the fire and warm themselves and feel 
is to get up and do some really useful thing. If 
necessary, let them also take a dose of Carlyle 
morning and evening for a month. Indeed, I am 
inclined to place over against the lines of Landor 
the vigorous phrases in which Professor William 
James has summed up what he considers the 
most important thing that Carlyle has said to 
us. He makes the philosopher of Chelsea say: 
"Hang your sensibilities! Stop your snivelling 
complaints and your equally snivelling raptures ! 
Leave off your general emotional tomfoolery, 
and get to work like men ! " This is the prescrip- 
tion for those who are here for their health. 

Others, to all appearance, have come to view 
the country. They have merely dropped in upon 
us to see what we are like and what we are about. 
They do not call us away from our work as the 
health-seekers do ; neither do they turn to and 
lend a hand. They look at life through an opera 
glass; it interests them as a spedtacle, and as no- 
thing more; whether the world goes well or ill 
is no concern of theirs; public spirit does not 
move them; they shun all entangling alliances 
with efforts to make the world better; for the 
word "obligation" you search their vocabulary in 
vain ; no matter what moral question stirs men's 
blood, or what crisis may arise in the common 
weal, it leaves them calm and undisturbed; they 
take no lot or part in it; all they want is to "look 
an' see." For are they not tourists and sight- 
seers? They came as foreigners, and foreigners 



VURNINQ LAMPS, &c. 13 

they remain, with that far-awayness of attitude 
and manner which you might exped: in a visitor 
from the moon; in a word, they prefer to be 
spe&ators, as at some great drama, and to sit in 
the gallery, and become critics, and of course pes- 
simists, and assure one another that life is not 
worth living; in which assurance they are right, 
if what they mean is a life like theirs. 

But there are still others. Let us thank Heaven 
that there are others — a third class — who are 
willing to shoulder responsibilities and bear bur- 
dens. They have come for business ; they find life, 
not a spedacle, but an opportunity; they min- 
gle with their fellow men and are a part of what 
they see; it makes a difference to them how the 
world is going; they want it to go right; when 
there is anything to be done, they know that they 
are the ones to do it; they are always ready, and 
when they go they go straight forward. These are 
the men and women who want their lives to 
count for something ; their idea is not to get what 
they can out of the world, — such a thought never 
enters their mind, — but to put what they can 
into the world; they are "soldiers of conscience"; 
they are the world's helpers and hope-bringers, 
burning lamps and coals of fire. 

It is in this class that such heroic men as 
St. Paul, St. Francis, Savonarola, and Martin 
Luther belong; such patriots as Samuel Adams, 
George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and The- 
odore Roosevelt; such preachers as Chrysostom, 
Ambrose, John Wesley, Henry Ward Beecher, 



i 4 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

and Phillips Brooks; such poets as Dante, Mil- 
ton, Alfred Tennyson, and John G. Whittier; 
such teachers as Thomas Arnold, Mark Hop- 
kins, Samuel C. Armstrong, and Mary Lyon; 
such ministrants of humanity as Florence Night- 
ingale, Clara Barton, and Frances E. Willard, — 
these and many more in all departments of life; 
also the great multitude who are unknown to 
fame, but whose names are written in the book 
of those who love and serve mankind. All these 
represent widely different personalities, abilities, 
and achievements, but one common fellowship 
of earnest living. 

We were born with certain capacities and 
opportunities; they may be great or small; we 
cannot greatly change them; they constitute the 
limits within which our work must be done; but 
the interest we take, the zeal we show, the use 
we make of those powers, — all this is left in our 
own hands. 

Suppose we take another look at the switch- 
board. The illustration is homely, but true. We 
find there a small lever controlled by a small 
wheel. The lever has no power to increase or 
diminish the amount of electricity in the board; 
but if we look at the register which measures 
the intensity, we shall see that the turning of the 
lever in one direction or the other increases or 
diminishes the intensity of the light, making the 
lamp burn bright or low. What that small lever 
is to the switchboard, a person's will power is to 
his life. Some Power other than ourselves sup- 



BURNINg LAMPS, &c. 15 

plies the amperage of life; we must take care of 
the voltage. The lamp of the humblest soul on 
earth, though the lamp be small and unseen of 
the world at large, is seen of heaven and may 
burn with as much intensity as that of any pro- 
phet or apostle of old. 

The names of the men and women enume- 
rated above are incentives toward the right kind 
of life in other people. The power of personality, 
for moulding character and inspiring to worthy 
deeds, is the mightiest power on earth. The argu- 
ment of a good example is an argument for which 
there is no answer. The list of such lives might 
be indefinitely extended if space allowed. But 
there is one name that we can by no means af- 
ford to omit. It stands for a complete and won- 
derfully consistent life, — a life that will be cited 
more and more in our schools and colleges, as 
Professor Jowett, the famous Greek scholar of 
Oxford University once remarked, because of its 
educational power. Open the book of that life 
and read. The very first sentence that strikes 
your eye — the first recorded utterance of that 
life — is this: "Knowye not that I must be about 
my Father's business ?" Open it farther on in 
the period of manhood, and what do you see? 
"My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." 
Turn over a leaf and read again : " I do always 
those things that please Him." Look on the last 
page and see if it holds out to the end. What do 
you find? " I have finished the work which Thou 
gavest me to do." 



16 THE LIFE TH*AT COUNTS 

Here then is a life without blot or blank. From 
beginning to end it is filled with noble things. 
And the most wonderful thing about it is that it 
shows what possibilities exist in you and in me. 



THE FtACE OF A <M*sf3^ 




T is an interesting question how 
far we are responsible for our 
faces. No man by taking thought 
can increase the length of his 
nose or the height of his fore- 
head; neither can he change the 
color of his eyes or the form of 
his chin. These features we receive from our 
parents, thankfully or regretfully, and it be- 
hooves us to make the best of them. 

On the other hand, what we choose to eat and 
drink exerts a modifying influence on the face. 
We are conscious, too, of exercising a dired: 
control over the delicate muscles of the facial 
machinery. But the strongest influence is the 
thoughts and feelings we entertain; these have a 
way at times of leaping into the face and pro- 
claiming themselves to all the world as from a 
housetop; more commonly, however, they stray 
thither without our knowing it, and this tendency 
becomes a fixed habit; they come and go and 
leave their tracks behind them; the same thought 
or feeling takes the same path each time, wear- 
ing it into greater and greater distinctness, till 
the observing world begins to learn what sort of 
travelers have passed that way; and our faces, 



18 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

thus lined and written upon, become as epistles 
known and read of all men. 

The responsibility for our faces, therefore, 
seems to be divided between our ancestors and 
ourselves; but, as a practical matter, the world 
drops ancestry out of the account and holds 
every man responsible for his own face, and for 
the whole of his face, however he came by it. If 
we want to know anything about a man, and 
there are no other means available, we study his 
face. When we say, "I like that face," or, "I 
don't like that face," we mean the character of 
the man who wears the face. 

Evidently the Church had something of this 
sort in mind when, long ago, it took the four 
faces described by the prophet and distributed 
them among the four Evangelists — giving Mat- 
thew the face of a man, Mark the face of a lion, 
Luke the face of an ox, and John the face of an 
eagle — according to a supposed resemblance be- 
tween the particular Gospel and the thing sym- 
bolized by the face; and, for our present purpose, 
it will be easy to regard these faces as symbols of 
four great traits of chara&er which every person 
requires who would serve his fellow men. 

What, then, does the face of a man represent? 
If you introduce a little hydrogen gas under the 
bell-jar of an air-pump, it will at first rise to the 
top and then spread gradually outward and down- 
ward through all the air which the jar contains. 
If the gas be oxygen and you introduce it from 
above, it will sink to the bottom, and in a simi- 



THE FACE OF J: MAN 19 

lar way spread outward and upward. Why the 
gas that is lighter than air should send any of 
itself downward, or why the other gas that is 
heavier than air should send any of itself upward, 
nobody really knows. But such is the fad. Either 
gas seems compelled, by some internal power, to 
expand in all directions till it has distributed its 
infinitesimal particles impartially throughout the 
entire enclosure, and the fad: would be the same 
if the bell-jar were as big as St. Peter's dome. 
This illustrates what a true humanity is like: it 
reaches downward to those below us in rank 
or ability or opportunity, and upward to those 
above us, and outward to those around us, and 
the principle of expansion in it we call sympathy. 
I mean that our humanity, if it is normal and the 
essential thing has not been squeezed out of it by 
selfish living, will transcend the bounds of kin- 
ship, of friendship, of patriotism, even of race, 
till one is able to say, " Nothing which concerns 
a human being is foreign to me/' 

What a difference it would make in the rela- 
tions between capital and labor, between rich and 
poor, between nation and nation, between race 
and race, if only it were remembered what the face 
of a man represents! It represents brotherhood; 
it represents sympathy, that great human quality 
which can bind men together and make brother- 
hood a recognized fad: instead of an empty name. 
It is of this sympathy I wish to speak. Human 
sympathy is a priceless possession in anybody's 
life; for the highest service as well as for the high- 



20 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

est culture it is indispensable; it is an element in 
all leadership; unless one feels with others, he can 
never understand them, or exert much influence 
over their lives. Not what we possess in separate- 
ness and isolation, but what we possess in com- 
mon or are able and willing to share, gives us 
power and usefulness among men. The greatest 
benefactors of the race have been men of great 
sympathies; with the spirit of caste or exclusive- 
ness they have had no lot or part; there is not 
a snob or a Pharisee among them all. If there was 
one quality more than another which won for 
Abraham Lincoln the confidence of men and en- 
abled him to carry his country through a great 
crisis, it was his sympathy as revealed in charity 
for all and malice toward none. You may do al- 
most anything with people who believe you wish 
them well. 

We are too much occupied in thinking simply 
of our own affairs; we do not concern ourselves 
enough with the fad: that others have their lives 
to live too. The worst of it is, not that we lead 
narrow lives, but that we are well satisfied to do 
so. Watch the people rushing for a crowded car : 
why so much haste? Are they afraid they will not 
arrive in time to do some one a service? Oh, no, 
they are not worrying about that; they want to 
make sure of a seat; their only fear is lest some 
one else may get it and get the comfort of it 
rather than themselves. Most people treat life as 
a crowded car and rush for the best places in the 
same way. Of course there is no dignity in this; 



THE FACE OF Jl MAN 21 

the common name of it is selfishness; and yet we 
seldom condemn it, so content we are not to pre- 
fer one another in honor. 

We have, each one of us, our own little world 
of experience. Many people imagine this to be 
all the world there is ; they make it their stand- 
ard of judgment; they expeft other people to 
know as they know, to think as they think, to do 
as they do, considering any departure from their 
particular ways and opinions as a subjed for ridi- 
cule or remark. Of course there is no dignity in 
this, either; the common name is provincialism; 
those afflicted with it do not know, and they do 
not know that they do not know. 

Now the moment we cross the boundary line 
from our own little world into the little world of 
some other person and see how things look to 
him, the perspective begins to change; we modify 
some of our opinions; we find, perhaps, that in 
the same situation we should think and a£t as he 
does. The more of these little worlds we visit, 
that is to say, the larger our experience becomes, 
the better we learn that there is one great world 
encompassing them all. It is the supreme objed: 
of education to get us out of our narrowness and 
make us citizens of this larger world. 

But sympathy has its enemies. Suppose some 
one should tell you that a couple of armed sen- 
tinels were patrolling before the house in which 
you live with the avowed purpose of never letting 
you set foot out of doors again, you would prob- 
ably be disturbed, if you thought he meant it; 



22 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

possibly you might pluck up courage enough to 
look out of the window and then reply, "I don't 
see any one; I think you must be mistaken." 
But suppose, instead of saying "the house in 
which you live," he should say " your own little 
world;" and suppose he should give the armed 
sentinels their rightful names, calling one of them 
the Habit of Talking Overmuch about One's Self 
and the other the Habit of Talking Unkindly 
about One's Neighbor, you would not feel nearly 
so frightened, though you would have vastly more 
cause for it. Both these well known members of 
the Habit family make it their business to de- 
stroy human sympathy ; whenever they present 
themselves before any one's little world, they 
have come with the intention of keeping him shut 
up there forever; they mean that, so far as they 
can prevent it, he shall never discover the good 
and true and beautiful things in the larger world 
outside. And the more he sees no harm in their 
presence, the more he becomes their prisoner. 

A good listener is much rarer to find than a 
good talker. The trouble with the world is not 
that it has not had talking enough, but that it 
has not had listening enough. You will occasion- 
ally see two persons engaged in conversation — - 
that at least is what they call it — when each talks 
only of what specially concerns himself and pays 
no attention to what the other is saying, except by 
a quick yes or no, or nod of the head. Some one 
has wittily defined a bore as a person who talks 
of himself when you want to talk of yourself. 



THE FACE OF *f MAN 23 

And yet as bad as this habit is, the other is 
worse. Better to talk in a dull way about one's self 
than to talk unkindly about one's neighbors. A 
bore may be less interesting than a gossip, but he 
is safer to associate with in this world and surer 
of consideration in the day of judgment. The 
critical spirit and the helpful spirit have nothing 
in common. When one of them comes in the 
other goes out. They avoid each other's com- 
pany, like two ambassadors whose governments 
are at war. When we take the condudt and mo- 
tives of people into our laboratory for dissec- 
tion and classification, it is well to take along at 
the same time some words of Oliver Cromwell. 
" I beseech you," he said, "by the mercies of the 
Lord to believe in the possibility of your being 
mistaken." There are also four lines of Robert 
Louis Stevenson that ought to be inscribed on 
the memory of every man, so alive they are with 
warm human sympathy and sound common sense. 
The lines are these : 

a There is so much bad in the best of us, 
And so much good in the worst of us, 
That it hardly behooves any of us 
To talk about the rest ofus" 

Maxims that bear on the question of sympathy 
and service are easily found. I will offer but 
three. 

First: Do not isolate yourself from other peo- 
ple. Physical isolation breeds mental and spirit- 
ual isolation. Remember, but do not copy after, 



24 THE LIFE TH<AT COUNTS 

the parish priest in the poem, who climbed up 
"in a high church steeple to be nearer God." 

u And in sermon script 
He daily wrote 

What he thought was sent from heaven ; 
And he dropped it down 
On the people's heads 
Two times one day in seven. 

" In his age God said^ 
i Come down and die' 

And he cried out from the steeple^ 
i Where art thou. Lord? 9 

And the Lord replied^ 
i Down here among my people' " 

Ta be alone is often necessary for recuperation 
and preparation, but also, if one wants to make 
his work effective with people he must go where 
people are. Henry Ward Beecher's power was 
largely due to the fad: that he mingled with men. 
The power of usefulness decreases inversely as 
the square of the distance because sympathy de- 
creases. The message you send is far less effedive 
than the message you carry. The Divine Life did 
not send truth into the world; the Divine Life 
brought truth into the world. Personal contad 
is what counts ; it means sympathy. Your life is 
your message, and it is forever preaching itself 
to other lives. The time has gone by when it was 
complimentary to compare agreat man to a lonely 
star or a mountain peak ; the comparison needed 
now is that of the broad warm prairie which not 
only receives the sunshine of heaven, but also 



THE FACE OF *A MAN 25 

gives it back again in fruit and friendliness to all 
who come. 

Take pains, then, to consider other people's 
lives ; enlarge your acquaintance ; beware of giv- 
ing yourself wholly to one friend, or two friends, 
or three; it hurts you and it hurts your friend; 
mingle with people outside your particular"set." 
But never delude yourself with the idea that they 
need you any more than you need them; no mat- 
ter what your acquirements, you will rarely find 
a person who is not your superior in some re- 
sped and at whose feet you cannot sit and learn. 
The blacksmith, in so far as he can shoe a horse 
and you cannot, is your superior; and so are 
the butcher and the baker and the candlestick 
maker; and so is any one who bears the ills of 
life with a braver heart. You will be surprised, 
too, in discovering that what you have in com- 
mon with others is vastly more than what you 
have as an individual possession; you are not a 
unique person; you are quite like other people. 
What John saw in his splendid vision of the ideal 
society was not little groups of two or three, here 
and there, in corners by themselves; what im- 
pressed him was the great multitude united by 
a common interest and sympathy; there are no 
cliques in heaven. 

Second: Do something for somebody. Not 
only mingle with people, but lend a hand wher- 
ever you can. The case is not fully stated when we 
say that what we do depends on what we think. 
It is equally true that what we think depends on 



26 THE LIFE THJlT COUNTS 

what we do. A strange adtion and reaction exist 
between thought and deed. We cannot tell why 
it is so; but it seems to be a great psychological 
law that thought should influence deed, and that 
deed should influence thought. 

Perhaps the easiest way of coming into sym- 
pathy with a person is to begin by doing him a 
service. If you wrong a person, you are likely to 
think ill of him in consequence; if you do him a 
kindness, you are likely to think well of him in 
consequence and to do him another kindness. 
Benjamin Franklin once put this trait of human 
nature to a practical use. He wanted to win over 
an influential man whose opposition he feared. 
What do you suppose he did? He went to him 
and asked the loan of a certain book which he 
named. Now Franklin did not want the book any 
more than he wanted the moon ; what he was 
after was to get the man to do him a favor for the 
sake of the influence of the deed on the attitude 
of the man's mind. It worked like a charm. 

Whatever we do has a tendency to arouse our* 
interest. The old excuse, "I 'm not interested," 
is no longer valid; it only pushes the matter 
back on the question, "But why aren't you in- 
terested?" We know now that the interest we 
take in things or in persons is the result of our 
own choosing; we may become interested in what 
or in whom we will. There is a city which may be 
called the City of Our Interests; it is surrounded 
by a strong and high wall, in which there are 
two gates, — the Gate of Thinking and the Gate 



THE FACE OF Jl MAN 27 

of Doing, — and people are forever entering in 
through the one or the other. Look at a thing 
long enough, turn it over in your mind, become 
familiar with it, and, before you are aware, you 
have entered into the City through the Gate of 
Thinking. But if that seems difficult, and you 
make your approach from the other side, the 
Gate of Doing stands always open; you can al- 
ways do what you know you ought to do. Do 
something for people and you will become inter- 
ested in people; do your duty and you will be- 
come interested in your duty; and, lo, you have 
entered into the City through the Gate of Doing. 
When you are within the City, through which- 
ever gate you enter, you will find yourself ready 
both to think and to do. Do, therefore, what you 
believe you ought, even if you feel no interest in 
it; you will feel an interest by and by. He that 
doeth the will shall know of the do&rine. 

Third: As to any service which you render a 
fellow being, do not regard it in the light of a fa- 
vor, but rather in the light of a debt; it is not 
somethingyou give, but somethingyou owe. The 
greatest of the apostles declared himself a debtor 
to all men. 

This is an important distinction ; it determines 
the difference between the patronizing spirit, 
which is death to all sympathy, and the spirit of 
brotherly regard, which alone is the sympathy we 
want. There is no place in the world for the I-am- 
better-than-you sort of feeling. That is the dead- 
liest of all the poisons that eat into and destroy 



28 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

the human soul. The man who patronizes an- 
other — who reaches some favor or help to him 
on the end of a long pole — fails to recognize 
our common humanity; he does not wear the 
face of a man. 

No, you are a debtor. Look at the things which 
you are pleased to call your own — your life, 
your home, your friends, your education, your 
money, your power to work — and consider how 
you came by them ; they are the result of forces 
that were at work in the world before you ar- 
rived; they are loaned you, every one of them; 
your part in the affair — surely, not a burdensome 
part — has been to put forth your hand and re- 
ceive; the utmost that even a self-made man has 
ever done to make himself what he is has been 
to take and use the opportunities which he found 
prepared and set before him ; freely ye have re- 
ceived. And these things were sent you as tools 
are sent to a workman, not to do as you please 
with, but to use as the Great Employer desires; 
they were sent you, for the most part, by the hands 
of your fellow men, whose right it is to receive 
what you have to offer in return; so far as your 
duty is concerned, your fellow men are the repre- 
sentatives of God. 

Humanity has done vastly more for every in- 
dividual than the individual has done, or will ever 
be able to do, for humanity; no man can repay 
the debt though he should live a thousand years. 
But there is one thing a man can do, and if there 
is any self-respe£t or right feeling in his heart he 



THE FACE OF Jl MAN 29 

will do, and that is, he will look on it as a debt. 
He will cast away the old worn-out motto, which 
has strewn the earth with battlefields and filled 
its homes with sorrow, the motto, namely, "My 
rights your duties ;" and he will substitute, by 
that reversal which the spirit of Christ makes pos- 
sible, the better and nobler motto, which replaces 
war with arbitration among states, and changes 
alienation into brotherhood among individuals, 
— the motto, namely, "Your rights my duties. " 

These three maxims, then, — Mingle with peo- 
ple, Do something for others, Keep a lively sense 
of gratitude in your heart, — are worthy of con- 
sideration for their sympathy-compelling power. 
And there is one word more. Sympathy may be 
dangerous as well as helpful. That depends on 
the way it is exercised. If your friend has quar- 
reled with another person, or entertains a griev- 
ance of any kind, and comes to you for sympa- 
thy, the temptation is very great to take his point 
of view without considering whether he may not 
himself have been at fault. This is a false loyalty. 
If the fault was his and you overlook it or mini- 
mize it, your sympathy is dangerous; it only con- 
firms him in his error and leaves him in a worse 
condition than he was in before. Blind partisan 
sympathy encourages division and destroys con- 
fidence; it is the most harmful thing you can 
offer a friend. 

If,on the other hand, you analyze the case and 
point out to your friend wherein he was wrong 
as well as right, thus showing that you sympa- 



3 o THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

thize, not with his worse, but with his better self, 
you have done what is perhaps the greatest ser- 
vice that one human being can do for another; 
you have set him to thinking and helped him to- 
ward that self-knowledge where all progress in 
chara&er begins. 

Emerson, in referring to the wrong kind of 
sympathy, — " base sympathy/' he calls it, — says : 
"We come to those who weep foolishly, and sit 
down and cry for company, instead of impart- 
ing to them truth and health in rough eledric 
shocks." 

Jesus Christ, the greatest moral teacher and 
the most sympathetic friend the world has ever 
seen, never gave sympathy pure and simple to 
any person; it was always the sympathy with 
righteousness in it, and therefore it helped lift 
the person to a higher plane. He could eat with 
publicans and sinners without for one moment 
^allowing them to feel that he condoned their 
wrong-doing; he sympathized with such tenden- 
cies as he found in them towards a better way of 
life. It is the part of wisdom in a man to follow 
an example like that — to make his alliances with 
the good, and never with the evil, that he finds 
in other men. 

Human sympathy is a mighty power. It con- 
stitutes the solvent for most of our troubles. The 
light that will banish the darkness from the so- 
cial and industrial life of to-day must be a light 
that will shine there in the face of a man. 



THE FvfCE OF *A LIOO^C 

i 




NE of the days that stand out with 
most prominence in my memory 
is the day when I looked for the 
first time on Lucerne and the 
Swiss mountains. The town lay 
along the edge of the lake; the 
waters of the lake were as smooth 
and transparent as glass, and where they poured 
through the river Reuss, their natural outlet, 
they suggested a river of beryl or emerald. And 
then the great silent friendly mountains, like 
guardians, stood all about, — Righi in the dis- 
tance, and close at hand the overpowering ma- 
jesty of Pilatus with his belt of mist. The air 
breathed of security and peace. We had come 
up from Paris on the night train — from the glare 
of eledxic lights, from the noisy boulevards and 
the tumultuous life of that restless city — and 
the contrast was very great; it almost seemed as 
if we had left the world behind us, and with the 
morning light were being ushered into the pre- 
sence chamber of all the Alpine range or even 
of Nature herself; everything was so simple, so 
beautiful, and on so grand a scale. 

But closely conne&ed with this environment 



32 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

of nature was something of even greater interest. 
In a spot retired from the town, there rises a per- 
pendicular cliff of gray rock ; you catch glimpses 
of its face through the intervening trees as you 
approach; a grotto, cut into the cliff about a third 
of the way up, contains the colossal figure of a 
lion; the poor beast, lying on his side, with the 
broken shaft of a javelin through his body and 
the agony of death in his face, was chiseled from 
the living rock; so much he seems a part of his 
surroundings that all the sculptor had to do, you 
might imagine, was to draw aside a curtain and 
show you a lion which had been dying there from 
the foundation of the world. 

And in a sense this is true. Even the most 
unread and indifferent visitor experiences a feel- 
ing akin to awe in that quiet place, and vaguely 
believes that what he looks on is more than the 
figure of a lion; that there is a meaning back 
of it all which connects the visible symbol with 
something as great and enduring as the everlast- 
ing hills. The two shields — one of them marked 
with the cross and the other with the fleur-de-lis 
— remind you of the story. Your thought goes 
back to the great city on the banks of the Seine 
as it appeared that summer day in 1792. All 
Paris is in uproar; its frenzied thousands, howl- 
ing like demons, are marching toward the palace 
of the king; they thirst for his blood. The king 
cannot trust the army; he must look for safety 
to the single regiment of Swiss soldiers which 
constitutes his palace guard; his enemies have 



THE F<ACE OF Jl LIOD^ 33 

attempted to bribe even them, but they will not 
be bribed; everything that threats can do has 
been done, but they will not be frightened; come 
what will, they take their orders from the king 
alone; he escapes from the palace, but they still 
remain to hold the mob in check; presently an 
order comes from the king to cease firing, and 
they obey, though knowing well the consequence. 

The story is too long and too terrible to be 
related here; the men of the Swiss Guard were 
faithful ; unable to defend themselves any longer, 
because of that ill-advised order of the king, they 
were overwhelmed by the mob and laid down 
their lives, every man at his post. That was in 
tumultuous Paris, and here in far-away Switzer- 
land, among the steadfast mountains, beside the 
lake shaped like the cross of sacrifice, and under 
the open sky, which things had " nourished their 
fresh young spirits," as Mr. Ruskin says, we 
find their memorial; it looks like the apotheosis 
of failure, but in reality means the glorification of 
fidelity and courage. The yellow leaf, the symbol 
of all that is transient and perishable, falls from 
the trees on the brow of the precipice into the 
pool at its foot; but the sculptor's work sym- 
bolizes great qualities that are permanent and 
eternal in the character of God and heroic men. 
In the impressive stillness of the place your in- 
terest passes from nature to this work of art, and 
from that to the moral life. 

The theme of this chapter is the face of a lion 
as symbolizing courage. The lion, whether in 



34 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

legend or in literature or in heraldry, has always 
stood for that cardinal virtue. He roams through 
the pages of Homer supplying the poet with 
many a simile for describing the heroes of the 
Trojan War. He remains the symbolical repre- 
sentative of the greatest empire of modern times. 
I n these cases he is portrayed as strong and vigor- 
ous and full of aggressive power. Were we look- 
ing on such a lion as that — one, for example, in 
the ad of advancing upon his prey, his eyes afire 
with concentrated energy and the muscles of his 
body like springs of steel ready to be released — 
he would be recognized at once as a fitting sym- 
bol of courage. But in regard to a lion whose 
power is gone and whose face wears the asped 
of pain, there may be room for doubt and hesi- 
tation. If the question arises in any one's mind, 
as probably it does, whether courage has any 
special relation to death or pain, the reply must 
be that most assuredly it has. Courage in every 
instance must take pain into the account, either 
pain actual or pain potential. Pain, if not seen, 
is always in the background. The advantage, for 
our present purpose, in choosing the Lion of 
Lucerne, is the fad: that the pain has advanced 
into the foreground where we can easily see it. 
What, then, is courage which we need so much, 
but possess so little? Courage is the willingness 
to endure pain for the sake of some end in view. 
You lie in bed one of these winter mornings 
thinking how you will shiver with the cold when 
you first rise; you hesitate and wait because you 



THE F^CE OF Jl LIOO^ 35 

do not like to shiver; it is an unpleasant sensa- 
tion; it is pain; but presently you consider the 
advantages of being up and about your work, 
you decide to endure the temporary discomfort 
or pain of shivering in order to reach those ad- 
vantages, and so you make the plunge. That is 
courage; nothing very heroic, to be sure, but 
still courage as far as it goes. A policeman rushes 
into a burning house to rescue a child; he knows 
the smoke may smother him, or the exit may be 
cut off, or the floor may give way; nevertheless, 
he is ready to take all risks with the pain in- 
volved for the sake of his purpose. That too is 
courage. Eliminate the pain, or the possibility of 
pain, connected with an a6t and you eliminate the 
courage. The smitten lion represents courage in 
the highest degree, for the pain in his face is the 
pain of death; it means sacrifice to the utter- 
most. Greater courage, as well as greater love, 
has no man than this, that a man lay down his 
life for what he holds dear. The men of Switzer- 
land held loyalty dearer than life. 

It is important to understand not only the 
nature but also the value of courage. Anything 
which has the universal approval of mankind is 
worth considering with care. That is true of cour- 
age; it is the most widely appreciated virtue in 
the whole catalogue of virtues ; it elicits admira- 
tion from the savage and the civilized man alike; 
even when diredled to wrong ends it sheds a sort 
of glory along its path: the Captain Kidds, the 
Dick Turpins, the Jesse Jameses, and all the 



36 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

dare-devils of frontier life, though commonplace 
enough in their sins, are interesting for one thing 
— their courage. Courage was one of the four 
great virtues reverenced by the ancient world. 
The name of coward has always been the most 
opprobrious name you can apply to any person, 
and the name of hero the most honorable. The 
German Emperor decorates, with impartial hand, 
the Russian General Stoessel for defending Port 
Arthur and the Japanese General Nogi for cap- 
turing it, because of the undaunted courage dis- 
played in either case. 

There are reasons for all this. One is, that the 
other virtues, and in fad: about all the powers 
we possess, require the backing of courage to 
make them effedive. Loyalty, honesty, sym- 
pathy, convidions of right, high ideals, know- 
ledge, skill, — these are worth no more than old 
lumber in a person's life unless he has courage 
enough to put them to use. We fail oftener than 
anywhere else at the point of courage. Many a 
man sees what he ought to do, but he lacks the 
will power, the willingness to endure the neces- 
sary discomfort, that is to say, he lacks the cour- 
age, required for doing what he sees he ought. 
Some lives seem so well equipped and yet so 
fruitless of results that they remind one of a 
beautiful armory in which you find a splendid 
array of weapons, but no hand to wield them. 

Another reason for the high place of courage 
in the world's regard is the fad that no progress 
would be possible without it. We all desire cer- 



THE F^CE OF <A LIOO^ 37 

tain things which we do not possess; they are 
set before us like so many goals; one person de- 
sires the power to play some musical instrument ; 
another, the mastery of a language; another, a 
college education. Obje&s of desire loom up very 
attra&ively at times. How shall we attain to 
them? There is but one way: between ourselves 
and every goal, be it a near goal or a far goal, 
obstacles intervene and possibly dangers; the road 
is a road of difficulty, requiring labor and patience 
and self-denial from all who travel upon it. There 
shines the goal, here runs the road: are you will- 
ing to endure the privations of the journey for 
the sake of the prize? It is always a question of 
courage. The Pilgrim's Progress is a great book 
of courage because it deals with the journey. 

Courage would be in somewhat less demand 
if all we had to do were to walk in the footsteps 
of others. But there is no such beaten path; your 
experience must be different from that of every 
other person in the world; every life must, in 
some respefts, find its own path, feeling its way 
along from the familiar to the unfamiliar. Pro- 
gress would be impossible unless we were willing 
to do some things we have never done before — 
oftentimes, things which nobody has ever done 
before. This requires courage of the same order 
as the courage of discoverers and pioneers. 

The third reason for giving courage its high 
place is that this world is organized and fitted 
up exclusively for people of courage. Others do 
seem to stray in among us, but they have come 



38 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

to the wrong planet and the world gives them 
the cold shoulder. Courage is needed at every 
point. Nobody knows when he may be called 
upon to cope with a burglar, or to stop a run- 
away horse, or to rescue a drowning child, to say 
nothing of such a minor occurrence as visiting 
the dentist or facing a strange dog. And then the 
occasions for courage increase instead of dimin- 
ish as time goes on. There are more things to 
make us afraid now,ifwe choose to let them, than 
ever before. The ancients knew nothing of rail- 
way accidents, dangerous explosives, live wires, 
or the germ theory of disease. Many a locomo- 
tive engineer, or captain of an ocean liner, or 
superintendent of a powder mill, or hospital nurse, 
faces quite as perilous situations as ever con- 
fronted the men whom Plutarch extols for their 
courage. Every advance in civilization, though 
it drops off some old terror, adds one or two new 
ones in its place. The plan seems to be to keep 
the fearful person always uneasy, and the person 
of courage always on his mettle. 

Even the most quiet and guarded life is at no 
moment absolutely safe. The lamp we study by 
may explode ; the ceiling may drop on our heads ; 
we may slip and break an arm or burst a blood 
vessel; we may choke to death with a grapestone, 
as Anacreon is said to have done; or if we es- 
cape all these things, there is always the innu- 
merable and invisible army of microbes flying 
around in the air to attack us and end our lives 
in some other inglorious way. 



THE F^CE OF Jt LIO^ 39 

It is simply dangerous to live in a world of 
this kind. Life is a running of the gauntlet per 
tela per hostes y and would be utterly intolerable 
without courage. The people who are always 
smelling for sewer gas, or hunting for germs, or 
analyzing every ache, or providing against every 
contingency — like the English nobleman who 
carried a mousetrap when he traveled lest he 
should be troubled with mice in his room — these 
people are not the ones who do the serious work 
of the world. 

The objedt of life is not to find a pleasant road, 
but to reach a worthy goal, whatever the road. 
The one safe way is to do your work, that is, to 
do your duty, giving little thought to discom- 
forts and dangers. Seled: the right goal, keep your 
eyes on that goal, then go always straight for- 
ward; "if you meet the devil, cut him in two and 
go between the pieces." 

It should never be forgotten that a perpetual 
alliance exists between this universe and every 
courageous heart. There are resources outside 
ourselves that respond to our call. The man of 
one talent and large courage is a far greater power 
than the man of ten talents and small courage. 
You may match courage against opportunity 
nine times out of ten and be perfe&ly secure. 

When a lobster loses a claw, it is said that 
Nature supplies him with another. When a man 
loses a foot, or a hand, or an eye, it is gone for- 
ever. But Nature is not less kind; she knows that 
she has already supplied man with the power to 



4 o THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

exercise courage. It is amazing what deficiencies 
this will take care of. If one were asked to dis- 
cover and accurately describe the habits of the 
honey-bee without the use of his eyes, the task 
might well seem impossible. But that is what the 
German Huber did more than a hundred years 
ago; blind himself, he used the sight of others, 
telling them what to look for and questioning 
them of what they saw; he gathered his material 
in this slow and laborious manner, and then wrote 
a book which has remained the chief authority 
on the subject to this day. The historians Pres- 
cott and Parkman were blind, or nearly so; Mil- 
ton was blind; one of the most distinguished 
postmasters-general of Great Britain was blind; 
Beethoven was deaf. One would not expedt great 
results from men who seem deprived of the very 
faculties needed for achieving them. But these 
were men who refused to be discouraged; they 
were willing to endure the inconvenience, and put 
into their work the extra labor and patience re- 
quired. The world is full of examples, great and 
small. 

The real prizes of life are not carelessly be- 
stowed. Every man who would achieve anything 
is put to the test; before he gets far on the 
road, he is challenged by some circumstance that 
stands there like a sentinel: "Who goes there?" 
Every man who does achieve anything answers 
the challenge by resolutely pushing on. The man 
of little courage will turn back. 

Caution is a virtue, but not over-caution; 



THE F<ACE OF <A LIOD^ 41 

under some circumstances apparent recklessness 
becomes a virtue too. It now and then happens 
that the way to a great opportunity lies through 
the gateway of a single chance, and no one ever 
passes that gateway unless he be endowed with 
courage. The coward sits around waiting for 
something to turn up; whereas the man of cour- 
age — for the man of courage is always a man 
of action — begins to deal with what has already 
turned up, no matter how poor and unpromising 
it is. The essence of courage, it has been said, is 
to stake one's life on a possibility. 

The person who waits until everything is just 
to his mind, before beginning a piece of work, 
will never begin. This was the mistake of one of 
the most prominent generals of the Civil War. 
He was given a splendid army, and the country 
looked for splendid results. But the army did 
not move. The general wanted more men and 
more guns and more camp equipment first. These 
were cheerfully supplied. And still the army did 
not move. The general discovered other obsta- 
cles and conjured up bugaboos and assigned rea- 
sons why the condition of the army involved too 
many risks for an advance upon the enemy yet. 
He seemed to forget that war is "risky" at best, 
just as some people forget that life is risky. So 
the valuable weeks went by, and nothing was ac- 
complished till the army was taken from him and 
given to a more daring commander. 

Contrast this with an incident of the Revolu- 
tionary War — the first fight between the Amer- 



42 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

icans and the British on the water. A handful of 
untrained farmers with only the implements of 
the farm — axes, scythes, pitchforks, and a few 
old muskets — embarked on a sloop at the wharf 
of a small town in Maine intending to sail out 
into the bay and capture a vessel of the British 
navy that was armed with cannon. Think of it ! 
But they accomplished their purpose, and, in 
commemoration thereof, the name of the town 
they honored is borne around the world to-day 
by one of the vessels of our modern navy — the 
Machias. 

It is well to remember how much we owe, for 
the progress and well-being of the world, to men 
who have staked everything on a possibility, 
who have burned their bridges behind them, who 
have been leaders of a forlorn hope. The discov- 
ery of America was due to a man of this type. 
For strength, long-drawn-out steadfastness, un- 
reserved devotion to an idea, in the face of tre- 
mendous odds, the courage of Christopher Co- 
lumbus wears the aspect of sublimity ; it is to the 
courage of other men what the Amazon is to 
other rivers, or Niagara Falls to other catara&s. 
The Pilgrim Fathers led a forlorn hope when 
they cast in their lot with the sea and the wilder- 
ness and the wolves and the Indians. Washing- 
ton led a forlorn hope when he drew his sword 
under the Old Elm at Cambridge and beheld 
the ill-clad, ill-trained, almost weaponless men, 
with whom he was to stand against the disci- 
plined armies of England. Opportunity from Co- 



THE F*ACE OF *f LIOD^ 43 

lumbus, freedom from the Pilgrim Fathers, se- 
curity from Washington — these greatest of hu- 
man blessings are each the result of a courage 
sufficient to transform a forlorn hope into a glo- 
rious achievement. 

These great examples have been mentioned 
in order to bring into view the possibilities of 
courage which exist in the human spirit. When 
we think of the men and women who have braved 
the perils of the sea, of the wilderness, of per- 
secution, of war; when we remember the risks 
undertaken and the dangers faced every day by 
those who sail our ships, work our mines, build 
our bridges, tunnel our mountains, or run our 
trains — the amount of courage we are called 
upon to exercise in our more sheltered lives 
looks ridiculously small. And yet, as it shames 
us to confess, we oftentimes halt and hesitate be- 
fore some insignificant obstacle and perhaps give 
over the task. That is not a noble thing to do. It 
is not living up to our birthright. We too have 
battles to fight, as others have, and as all our fa- 
thers had; and if we are to be of any earthly use 
in the world, we will fight them with a brave heart, 
fleeing from no responsibility and shirking no 
duty ; we will learn the great lesson of self-reli- 
ance, not expe&ing others to do for us what we 
are abundantly able to do for ourselves. The edu- 
cation which does not lead up to that is no educa- 
tion at all. One of the things we are here for— 
in school, in college, in the world itself — is to ex- 
ercise our powers, win the mastery of our envi- 



44 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

ronment and so find the satisfa&ion which only 
the person of courage can ever know. 

Virgil says of the crew that won in the boat 
race: "They can because they think they can." 
A motto of the German Emperor consists of the 
single word " Nevertheless." The world makes 
way for the man who goes always straightforward 
with confidence in himself and with the spirit of 
Nevertheless written in his forehead. However 
formidable the difficulties may look in the dis- 
tance, they dwindle or slink away or change to 
something else as we resolutely move among 
them. When Gareth, in Tennyson's poem, re- 
fused to be frightened at what seemed an uncon- 
querable enemy, he found that all the horrible 
accoutrements of this enemy, Death, were merely 
the disguises which concealed a beautiful boy. It 
almost seems as if the bugaboos of life wear the 
appearance they do in order to frighten off the 
faint-hearted and attradt the courageous; they are 
sifters of men. We are always entering the ter- 
ritory of new and untried experiences. But the 
Providence that keeps a hand on human affairs 
has preceded us, and has prearranged things every 
step of the way to the advantage of the man of 
courage. What Moses said to the children of Is- 
rael, as they stood on the borders of the Pro- 
mised Land and were about to enter it in spite 
of the giants they had heard of as dwelling there, 
is said to every man: "Be strong and of a good 
courage, and fear not, nor be afraid of them." 



THE FtACE OF <A LIO^C 
ii 




ANY of the most important 
things conne&ed with the sub- 
ject of courage we have not yet 
considered. When the ancient 
Greeks and Romans thought of 
courage they generally had in 
mind what we call physical cour- 
age — the courage of the soldier in battle, of the 
sailor buffeting with the waves, of the hunter 
fighting wild beasts, of the explorer venturing 
into unknown regions or among barbarous tribes. 
They never wearied of tales of daring and adven- 
ture. They found their ideals of courage in the 
legends of Hercules and the heroes of the Tro- 
jan War. Horatius defending the bridge against 
an army, or Mucius holding his hand in the flame 
to show Lars Porsenna what Romans were made 
of, would belong in their Pantheon of heroic 
men. This sort of courage is always in demand. 
As long as we have bodies to be hurt we shall 
need physical courage to endure the hurt. 

But, included in a wider scope of meaning 
which the word has acquired, there is one kind 
of courage whose demands are of paramount im- 
portance. It constitutes the crown and glory of 



46 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

all virtue. I refer to the courage which springs 
from conscience or is directed by conscience. It 
is sometimes called the courage of one's convic- 
tions, or moral courage. It adds to physical cour- 
age a tenfold power. You will find a boulder on 
Lexington Common which is eloquent of the cou- 
rage of men who dared follow their sense of right. 
On what is now a bit of lawn in front of the mo- 
dern law building of Harvard University, twelve 
hundred men stood with uncovered heads on the 
evening of June 16,1775, while the president of 
the college offered prayer; then they marched 
away to Bunker Hill. If the ears of Mother Eng- 
land had not been stopped in that day, she would 
have heard the voice crying out of heaven : "You 
may fight the principalities and powers of this 
world with perfedt safety, but beware how you 
lift up your banners against men whose con- 
science tells them that their quarrel is just." I 
hope that story about John Hancock is true: 
when he affixed his bold signature to the great 
Declaration, he is said to have remarked, as he 
laid down the pen, "There! John Bull can read 
that without spe&acles." 

Occasions arise when we must show our colors, 
when we must make plain our allegiance, what- 
ever the cost, — occasions in every life which af- 
ford no honorable escape through silence or con- 
cealment. In moral questions there is no neu- 
tral zone ; if there were, it would be filled with 
cowards. There is neither courage nor morality 
in the man who sits on the fence waiting to see 



THE F^CE OF <A LI03^ 47 

which way a selfish interest would have him go. 
Nobody respe&s him, and certainly he cannot re- 
spedt himself. The person without moral cour- 
age is the most pitiable objed: in all this world. 

We are obliged to handle principles of right 
and wrong every day of our lives, and it makes 
a vast difference how we do it. To prefer the 
smooth thing to the right thing has never yet 
proved to be the safe thing. If a man fears to 
take the unpopular side when he sees it to be 
the right side, or fears to do under any circum- 
stances what will bring on him the criticism or 
disapproval of others, he has reason to believe 
that his moral nature needs overhauling. It is 
easier to say, " I 'm with you," than to say, " I 'm 
with you so far as you are right," but there is no 
courage in it. A distinguished general of the Civil 
War expressed himself, in a public address, as 
standing on this sentiment: "My country, right 
or wrong." He happened to be a man of cour- 
age, but there is no courage in such a senti- 
ment. It is never right to do wrong even for 
one's country. The claims of righteousness have 
the precedence over all other claims in heaven 
or earth. He serves his country best, or his party 
best, who serves righteousness best. But it takes 
more courage. 

When a man fights the battles of a people, 
knowing their eyes are on him and their sympa- 
thy with him, he can do and dare great things 
with comparative ease. But if he ever separates 
from his countrymen on some moral issue, or 



48 THE LIFE THJIT COUNTS 

from his party, or from any group of his asso- 
ciates, and feels their sympathy withdrawn, then, 
\n his isolation, he faces a severer test, — the test 
of his moral courage. This was the loneliness of 
Jesus Christ; he saw that his convi&ions were 
at variance with the customs and opinions of 
the world. And yet, as he was quick to explain, 
he was not alone. And no man of moral courage 
ever is. The Father is with him; the unseen pow- 
ers are on his side; the universe is at his back. 
Every time we take a stand for righteousness, 
they that be for us are more than they that be 
against us. 

A man needs all the help he can get of this 
sort, in this era of organization, — of trusts and 
unions and classes, — when everybody belongs to 
something, and the something he belongs to has 
a tendency to dominate and intimidate him into 
conformity with the whole, whether the whole 
be right or wrong. Whatever we join, we must 
see that we do not "belong" to it in the sense 
of letting it own us both body and soul. Not 
even the church is entitled to a control like that : 
only God and righteousness. The progress of 
society does not depend on the group, but on 
the freedom, for thought and a&ion, of the in- 
dividual man; and this it is impossible to keep 
without moral courage. 

There is moral tonic in the great speech which 
Socrates delivered when on trial for his life. Pic- 
ture to yourself an old man of seventy years as 
he stands in the presence of his five hundred 



THE F<ACE OF ,4 LIO^ 49 

judges, every eye upon him and every ear listen- 
ing to his words. He knows that the issue of what 
he says will be life or death; but he shows no 
trace of fear; his consciousness of redtitude makes 
him indifferent to results. He knows that by tears 
and entreaties and denials and promises he can 
save his life; but these things he regards as un- 
manly, and brushes them all aside. He plants 
himself squarely on the justice of his case, and 
speaks with the perfect frankness of a man whose 
conscience is clear. And in this mood he utters 
many true and solemn things. He tells his judges 
that a man who is good for anything should not 
consider the chances of living or dying in what 
he undertakes, but only the right and wrong of 
it. "Wherever any one either stations himself," 
he says, "because he thinks it right to be there, 
or is stationed by his commander, there, I think, 
ought he to remain and face danger." How much 
this sounds like what we imagine was in the hearts 
of those brave young men of Switzerland who 
laid down their lives in Paris on that dreadful 
day. 

The beautiful portrait of Esther's chara&er, 
in the Bible book which bears her name, shows 
that she was possessed of great moral courage. 
This Hebrew girl, not older than the school-girl 
of to-day, took her life in her hand, although a 
queen, when she entered the presence of the 
Persian despot to plead for her people. Recall, 
too, the story of Nathan and David. The latter 
had committed a terrible sin and failed to appre- 



50 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

ciate its enormity. Then came the prophet Na- 
than before him one day like an incarnated con- 
science to reveal him to himself. He began by 
telling him a parable in which a man is repre- 
sented as doing a most dastardly thing; and when 
David's anger was kindled against such a man, 
the prophet of God looked upon the King of 
Israel — we can imagine the moral earnestness in 
his eyes and voice — and said, "Thou art the 
man." This was dired preaching, and David could 
not pass it over to his neighbor in the next pew. 
History affords more than one instance in 
which a humble man of God has dared, face to 
face, to rebuke wickedness in high places. In the 
fourth century the Emperor Theodosius, enraged 
at a riot in Thessalonica, had caused many thou- 
sands of innocent people to be put to death with 
the guilty. Not long afterwards he happened to 
be in Milan and went to the cathedral for the 
holy communion, as his custom was. But the in- 
carnated conscience awaited him. When the em- 
peror and his retinue arrived, there stood the 
brave bishop Ambrose in the vestibule, and for- 
bade him to enter. "How wilt thou," said the 
bishop, " how wilt thou lift up in prayer the hands 
still dripping with the blood of the murdered ? 
. . . Get thee away, and dare not to heap crime 
upon crime." Those were bold words to address 
to the emperor of the Roman world. But Theo- 
dosius quailed before them, and, in trying to 
stammer out an excuse, he appealed to David's 
sin. The bishop replied: "If thou hast imitated 



THE FJICE OF *A LI03^ 51 

David in his sin, imitate him also in his repent- 
ance. " And so he did. The emperor made a pub- 
lic confession, and afterward said that in Ambrose 
he had found the first man who told him the 
truth. 

One of the noblest examples of moral courage 
which history records is that of Martin Luther. 
In spite of the warnings of friends and of his own 
consciousness of peril, when summoned to the 
Diet of Worms, he declared he would go though 
there were as many devils in Worms as tiles on the 
roofs. Think of that august assembly into which 
this man, unaccustomed to the pomp and cere- 
monies of the world, was suddenly ushered. In 
the presence of the emperor, in the presence 
of sovereigns, princes, dukes, margraves, arch- 
bishops, bishops, the Pope's legates, the ambas- 
sadors of foreign courts, he was asked to recant. 
What did he do? He replied that, unless shown 
to be wrong, he could not recant, since it was 
unsafe to do anything against conscience. Then 
in the midst of those unsympathetic faces, he 
lifted up his eyes to heaven and uttered those 
memorable concluding words: "Here I stand. I 
cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen." 

Some years ago a candidate for a very high 
office in this country had his courage tested in 
a different way. There was a moral blot on his 
record which, if known and uncontradi&ed, might 
ruin his chances. During the canvass the old story 
was raked up, and a friend of the candidate, fa- 
miliar with the fads, telegraphed him to ask 



52 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

what answer should be made. The wire flashed 
back this magnificent reply: "Tell the truth." 

As we turn from examples like these to our 
own lives, we recall occasions, no doubt, when 
we miserably failed in moral courage. So much 
easier it is to hedge and evade and remain silent 
and stick to an error than to take a square stand 
for truth and right. It seems almost impossible 
for some people to say either yes or no until 
they are sure what it is that other people want 
them to say. Their standard is the expected 
rather than the right. They wilt before the slight- 
est opposition. They would not for the world 
offend anybody — except God and their own con- 
science. They are more afraid of ridicule than of 
a loaded gun. They would rather fight a duel 
than confess a fault or change an opinion. 

Not so Abraham Lincoln. He had manliness 
and courage enough to say in a letter to General 
Grant: " You were right and I was wrong." Large 
natures give themselves little concern about being 
either logical or consistent; they give themselves 
great concern about being right. This is a marked 
characteristic of Theodore Roosevelt. "I have 
seen him put to the test a hundred times, in little 
things and in great," says his friend, Jacob Riis, 
"and never once did he fail to ask the question, 
— if there was any doubt about it, after all was 
said and done, — c Which is right?' And as it was 
answered, so was the thing done." 

And yet many a man will hesitate to express 
an opinion, or to make a motion, or to advance 



THE F^CE OF Jl LIO^ 53 

a suggestion, until he thinks it will meet with the 
approval of others. Coleridge once said that "no 
man is ever so sure of anything but that he feels 
a little surer if only somebody else will say that 
he thinks so too." But there are some things 
we ought to be sure of, though the whole world 
deny them. Listen to your own instin&s; they 
will tell you the truth. Have courage enough to 
believe them and to obey them. Never let such 
a microbe as the love of popularity get into your 
moral life. You may never get it out again, and, 
in that case, you are doomed. You can get along 
without the praise, or even without the approval, 
of other people, but you cannot get along with- 
out the approval of your own conscience. I would 
not give a fig for the person who is always taking 
his color from his surroundings, always deriving 
his moral judgments, not from his sense of right, 
but from his idea of what other people will think. 
I have dwelt so long on this division of the 
subjed: that there is but little time for consider- 
ing other kinds of courage. President Hyde of 
Bowdoin College, in his interesting essay on the 
Cardinal Virtues, speaks of what he calls the cour- 
age of time and the courage of space, referring to 
the little sacrifices that right-minded people al- 
ways make to be punctual in their appointments 
and to keep things in their places. Pun&uality 
has been called the courtesy of kings; it is prac- 
ticed most among high-bred people. Orderliness 
is what gives harmony in place of discord in mu- 
sic, beauty instead of ugliness in art, and power 



54 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

instead of wastefulness in everyday life; it en- 
ables us to get the maximum of result from the 
minimum of effort. Homer describes the Trojans 
as pouring forth to battle in a helter-skelter con- 
fusion like a flock of sheep, the tribes that com- 
posed the mass all shouting in their various lan- 
guages. But he pictures the conquering Greeks as 
moving forward in a quiet and orderly manner: 

" So moved the serried phalanxes of Greece 
To battle, rank succeeding rank, each chief 
Giving command to his own troops; the rest 
Marched noiselessly ; you might have thought no voice 
Was in the breasts of all that mighty throng, 
So silently they all obeyed their chiefs, 
Their showy armor glittering as they moved 
In firm array" 

One of the four great virtues, as taught by the 
ancient Greek philosophers, is self-control. It is 
well to refer to it here on account of its close 
relation to courage. As courage means the will- 
ingness to endure pain, so self-control means the 
willingness to forego pleasure, for the sake of 
some objedl in view. It is the other half of cour- 
age, so to speak, inasmuch as the giving up of a 
pleasure is of itself a pain. Its importance we can 
hardly overstate. Whether a man shall go through 
life as a king, or as a slave, is likely to hinge on 
the question of self-control. Many a case of suc- 
cess and many a case of failure in life are traceable 
to the answer which that question receives. The 
mastery of circumstance begins with the mastery 
of self. Every advance in self-control means an 



THE FJICE OF ^ LIOO^ 55 

advance in character and personal power. The 
man who controls his appetites, his temper, his 
tongue, his faculties of body and mind, compel- 
ling them to serve instead of allowing them to rule, 
will find the door of opportunity opening every- 
where at his approach. The man who flies in a 
passion surrenders his case. The man who loves 
ease better than he does his goal will leave his 
bones by the way. The course of every life runs 
near the land of the Lotus-Eaters and the shore 
of the Sirens; he that tarries or yields is lost. 

This topic of self-control is a large one ; but we 
must pass on. A word should be said about the 
object and the willingness which, with the pain 
as already described, are elements of courage. 
Unless something is to be gained — something 
beyond an exhibition of daring or more worth 
while than mere notoriety — then, no matter what 
effort a man puts forth or what risk he runs, there 
is no true courage in the case. Such ads as going 
over Niagara Falls in a barrel, or jumping from 
the Brooklyn Bridge, or crossing the Atlantic 
Ocean in a dory, just to attrad: attention, carry 
no moral power; they indicate bravado and 
vanity; they are reserved for the foolhardy, who 
have never learned that living is a serious busi- 
ness. Life is not to be thrown away; nor is it to be 
jeopardized, or even put to inconvenience, except 
for adequate cause. Every true man knows that 
there are real causes enough for self-sacrifice, and 
he never attempts to create artificial ones. The 
cavalry charge of Major Keenan at Chancellors- 



56 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

ville, though he and every man with him knew 
it meant certain death, was not without an ob- 
je&. Had those three hundred men charged that 
army of ten thousand merely to perform a dar- 
ing deed, history would be obliged to write them 
down as three hundred fools instead of three 
hundred heroes. It is the object that glorifies the 
a<5t. To make a martyr of one's self just for the 
sake of being a martyr deserves no praise. Sacri- 
fice in and of itself is devoid of merit. A brave 
man will dodge a cannon ball or a mosquito bite 
if he can; but he will shrink from nothing that 
stands between himself and a worthy goal. 

On one occasion when William of Orange was 
giving orders to the members of his staff on a 
battlefield of Flanders, he discovered near him 
the deputy governor of the Bank of England, 
who had been drawn to the place by mere curi- 
osity. "Sir," said the king sharply, "you ought 
not to run these hazards; you are not a soldier; 
you are of no use to us here." "I run no more haz- 
ard than Your Majesty," the man replied. "Not 
so," said the king, "I am here where it is my 
duty to be, and I may without presumption com- 
mit my life to God's keeping; but you" — The 
sentence was left unfinished as the man fell dead 
at the king's feet. "That was a foolish courage," 
says The Outlook in recounting this incident; "life 
is too precious to be wasted in sham battles." 

The objed: in view is what glorifies an a£t on 
the assumption that the a£t is a voluntary one. 
And here comes in the element of willingness. 



THE FtrfCE OF <A LIOD^ 57 

The ad must be done in obedience to a command 
we issue to ourselves. It is what we choose. The 
seat of every virtue, as of every vice, is found in 
the will. The important thing is not what we 
achieve, but what we are desiring and trying to 
achieve. The world in its cool, calculating way 
looks chiefly at results; the true way is to look 
chiefly at the purpose. 

At first thought it might seem that the em- 
ployer, in the Parable of the Hours, was unfair 
in giving the men who had worked but one hour 
as much pay as he gave those who had worked 
the whole day through ; yet he was perfectly fair. 
The reward was not for work, but for willingness. 
The men who stood idle in the market place 
were all the while ready and willing to work, but 
no man had hired them; their opportunity did 
not come till the eleventh hour; then they made 
the most of it. Not only those who bear the bur- 
den and heat of the day, but those who are will- 
ing to bear the burden and heat of the day, are 
entitled in the realm of moral values to the full 
day's reward. Not only the soldier who lays down 
his life for duty's sake, but the soldier who would 
lay down his life if the occasion required, deserves 
well of his country. 

Courage, as the etymology of the word im- 
plies, is a matter of the heart. We cannot know, 
therefore, who are courageous and who are not 
until they are put to the test. There is a vast 
deal of latent courage in the world; we cannot 
see it; but it is there on demand. Every war calls 



58 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

it out, every epidemic, every great fire, every 
steamship or railway accident. The morning pa- 
per of almost any day records some brave or 
self-sacrificing deed which strengthens our hope 
for the world. 

It is inspiring to think that heroes and hero- 
ines may be among us whom we do not know as 
such, and who do not know themselves as such, 
but who at some future day will stand revealed. 
We cannot be sure as to the courage in our own 
hearts until occasion makes its demand. It be- 
hooves us, then, to strengthen the will ; to learn 
the meaning of sacrifice, not by hearsay but by 
experience; and to keep the ideal of duty ever 
before our eyes, in order that we may increase 
our reserve of moral power, which in time of need 
will express itself in courageous words and cour- 
ageous deeds. 



THE F^TCE OF <AN OX 




HE examples of praiseworthy 
conduct which have thus far 
been cited in these chapters were 
drawn, for the most part, from 
the striking and exceptional in 
life; they were the result of spe- 
cial opportunities such as will 
never come to the majority of men; they lay 
above the every dayness of life, and many of them 
rose into mountain peaks of heroism which can 
be seen and recognized afar off. Such examples 
are of the utmost value for their stimulating and 
lifting power; they show the possibilities of that 
human nature which is common to us all. But it 
would never do to let the matter rest there. It 
must not be supposed that the best and truest 
service is necessarily anything that attracts at- 
tention. This, indeed, has already been said, but 
it should be said now in a more emphatic way. 
It would be absurd for us to go out seeking a 
quest, after the manner of Don Quixote, when 
there are useful things, even if not conspicuous 
things, to be done just where we are. 

We should remember that the great deed, the 
heroic ad, is only the natural outcome of pre- 



60 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

vious conditions; the extraordinary springs out 
of the ordinary; there is nothing isolated or sud- 
den in nature or history or individual life; pro- 
gress is made, not by outbursts, but by silent 
evolution ; every ad: of a person grows out of 
and is connected with the general trend of his 
life as truly as a branch grows out of and is con- 
nected with the tree; the process is long; it is the 
revelation that seems sudden. Wellington once 
said that the battle of Waterloo was won at Eton 
and Rugby. In the same way the Franco-Prussian 
War was decided, long before Sedan, by the work 
and discipline of the Prussian schools. Students 
of music soon learn that in order to master the 
piano something more is required than merely 
to lay their hands on the keyboard and wiggle 
their fingers. Listen to a concert in which a hun- 
dred and fifty performers take part; how the 
sounds fly off from strings and pipes and human 
voices; how they mingle and blend and harmo- 
nize; all so easily and beautifully done ! But think 
of the hours and years of tedious praftice repre- 
sented there; if each performer has given ten 
years to his work, you have in the aggregate the 
labor of a person for fifteen hundred years to 
prepare for you that pleasant hour. When the 
artist John S. Sargent was in this country, he was 
paid, if report be true, ten thousand dollars each 
for some of the portraits he painted, though the 
aftual work required but a few days. It is the same 
story — previous study, training, self-denial, ex- 
perience, skill. A famous author was asked one 



THE F^CE OF ^N OX 61 

day how long it took him to write a certain poem 
which had received its form at his hands in a few 
hours. He replied, "Forty years." It required 
years and years to lay the foundations of Minot's 
Ledge Lighthouse, but after that the lighthouse 
went up in six months. A floating iceberg, with 
the sunlight beating on its pinnacles and towers, 
is a beautiful object; but for the hundred feet 
you see above the ocean surface there are eight 
hundred feet below. And so everywhere the seen 
is built upon the unseen, and would be impos- 
sible without it. The foundations come first. Pre- 
paration requires vastly more effort than per- 
formance does. We should fix our thoughts less 
on the single a6t that wins admiration and more 
on the faithful way in which we can meet the 
common duties that come to us day by day. If 
we are capable of doing anything worth while, 
we must do it primarily in the dull routine of 
life's workshop. 

And this brings us to the face of an ox, — the 
face of what some people perhaps consider the 
dullest and most prosaic of all God's creatures. 
There is nothing out of the ordinary about the 
ox — unless it be the fad: that he is extraordi- 
narily ordinary. He lacks imagination; the poets 
have no use for him; the herald's office, where 
coats of arms are made, will not touch him. The 
Lion of St. Mark looks down from his pedestal 
with considerable scorn, we might imagine, on 
the Ox of St. Luke. The ox plods along, never 
hurrying, never worrying, and seems perfectly 



62 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

content with his lot; he is a most unromantic 
beast. And yet he is a most useful one. Among 
animals he is nature's great utilitarian and the 
steadfast friend of man. He plows our fields, 
draws wood for the fire, and carries heavy bur- 
dens all his days; and when he dies he bequeaths 
his muscles to us for beef, his fat for tallow, his 
tail for soup, his stomach for tripe, his hide for 
shoes, his hair for holding the mortar on our 
walls, his hoofs and horns for glue and knife 
handles, and his bones for fertilizers. " Nothing 
of him that doth fade." The face of an ox sym- 
bolizes work and drudgery and patient perseve- 
rance — three of the indispensable things in every 
successful life. 

Hard work, for one reason or another, does 
not receive the same cordial welcome from most 
people that idleness does. We greet holidays with 
smiles and applause, but allow working days to 
come soberly along like guests at a funeral. This 
little antipathy between work and poor human 
nature takes on at times exaggerated forms, as 
witnesses the great army of tramps and idlers, 
of swindlers and speculators, of all sorts and con- 
ditions of men who are trying to get something 
for nothing. The sentence that might appropri- 
ately be inscribed over the gateway of every 
workhouse, jail and penitentiary in the land — 
the sentence of widest application to the inmates 
of those institutions — is this: "They did not 
mean to work." Satan finds his easiest game 
among the idle, the shiftless, and the pleasure- 



THE F<ACE OF <AN OX 63 

loving; he grows discouraged with the man who 
keeps busy at some useful task. 

What, then, is work? It is certainly nothing to 
run away from if you want your life to be worth 
living. It consists in lending a hand and contri- 
buting to the forces that make the world. It builds 
things up and makes them better. It builds the 
worker up and makes him better. It lifts the hu- 
man toward the divine; yea, it brings them to- 
gether. God works; therefore men should work. 
That apostle of work, Thomas Carlyle, has said : 
"All true work is sacred; in all true work, were 
it but true hand-labor, there is something of di- 
vineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its sum- 
mit in heaven." 

And so work is not a curse laid on the race; 
we must get rid of that idea at once; it is the 
race's opportunity. No people ever rose in the 
scale of being until they had learned the value of 
work. Every step upward means more work done. 
When men began to make pottery they ceased 
to be savages ; when they made their weapons 
and other implements out of metal instead of 
stone, thus using more effort, they had advanced 
a still longer way toward civilization ; as soon as 
they invented a phonetic alphabet and took pains 
to keep a written record, they had crossed the line 
into the civilized state. The working nations are 
the superior nations. In the long run the imple- 
ments of labor are more than a match for the 
implements of war. When the sword is beaten 
into the plowshare the result is an increase of 



64 THE LIFE TH<AT COUNTS 

power. Assyria with its terrible might is only 
dust on the face of the earth. Israel, which ex- 
alted work and not plunder, rules the world by 
its ideas. In the eighteenth century, two great 
European nations were striving for the mastery 
in North America, each by a different method. 
One of them sent soldiers and war material; 
it seized and fortified commanding points ; it em- 
phasized force. The other sent farmers and me- 
chanics and students,who cleared the forest, tilled 
fields, laid out roads, built homes and planted 
schools ; it emphasized work. By and by the plow- 
share came into contact with the sword, the home 
with the fortress, the worker with the fighter, and 
what was the result? The sword, the fortress and 
the fighter vanished away, while the plowshare, 
the home and the worker inherit the land. 

When people despise work, or relegate it to 
inferiors as something unworthy the dignity of 
highborn men, decay has already set in and they 
are going the way of Rome and of Spain. Every 
rise or fall in a man's real power depends oftener 
than he thinks on his estimate of work. Heaven 
holds its prizes just above our grasp, though not 
above our reach, in order to stimulate our effort. 
He that will not work for them is not worthy of 
them. Wealth, social station, talent, even genius, 
— these count for very little without work. Some 
one has gone so far as to describe genius as an 
infinite capacity for taking pains. Milton speaks 
of" laborious days" for the man who would win 
a name. If we could look at the original manu- 



THE F<ACE OF <AN OX 65 

script in the case of almost any great poem which 
people imagine to have been struck off by "in- 
spiration/' without labor, we should find many 
a telltale erasure and interlineation. Plato is said 
to have written one of his sentences in seven dif- 
ferent ways before getting it into the form he 
wished. Tennyson, the most musical of English 
poets except Milton, was one of the hardest of 
workers. Easy writing generally makes hard read- 
ing. Education means work; money will not buy 
it; you get out of your books only what you pay 
for, not in money, but in work. Even truth is an 
achievement; it comes to those who work for it. 
Of course there are many kinds of work, but 
no matter what our ordinary employment may 
be, we shall do well to take to ourselves the ad- 
vice that St. Paul gave the Thessalonians, and 
for some of the time work with our own hands. 
By working with our hands we come into fel- 
lowship with a larger number of our fellow men 
than in any other way. John Ruskin took a 
party of his Oxford students once and went out 
to help repair the highway, by breaking stone 
and shoveling dirt, in order to show his belief in 
the honorableness of such toil. One of the say- 
ings attributed to Christ — lost for nineteen cen- 
turies, but finally recovered from an Egyptian pa- 
pyrus roll — is this: "Cleave the wood, and you 
will find me; lift the stone, and I am there." We 
do not forget that he worked with his own hands 
at the carpenter's bench. Even Greek mythology 
contains some glimmerings of the divineness of 



66 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

hand-labor. Most of the Olympian divinities had 
nothing in particular to do, and apparently they 
did not want to have. They preferred to spend 
their time in feasting and gossiping and med- 
dling with other people's affairs. When mortals 
happened to meet one of them, the chances were 
that, like the Scotchman's dog, he was either go- 
ing to or coming from mischief. But there were 
two shining exceptions, — Hephaestus, the God 
of Fire, and Athene, the Queen of the Air, — 
who worked with their own hands, making use- 
ful and beautiful things for both gods and men. 
One of the pleasantest piftures of ancient Greek 
life, so often referred to by the poets, is that of 
the matron surrounded by her maids, when they 
were all engaged with needle or distaff in some 
useful work. That is an interesting scene which 
Virgil portrays, of thousands of Phoenicians at 
work, with the diligence of bees, on the walls and 
temples and other buildings of rising Carthage. 
Modern education has begun to recognize the 
fad: that we should train the hand by giving it 
something to do, as well as train the mind by 
giving it something to think about. 

All real work is an honor to the person who 
does it. And by real work I mean work that is 
worth doing because it really benefits somebody. 
It makes no difference whether the implement 
used be pen or pickaxe, hammer or hoe, needle 
or broom. If the thing is worth while, then the 
work is real work. Many more persons, however, 
than those referred to above as belonging in jail 



THE F*rfCE OF ^N OX 67 

or penitentiary appear to go through life with 
no sense of responsibility in the matter of work 
of any kind; their wants are supplied, and why 
should they work? Some of them live sumptu- 
ously every day, and what is the use of their 
making themselves miserable by work? They 
suppose, apparently, that all the necessities and 
most of the luxuries of life — bread and butter, 
coffee and beefsteak, clothing of every kind, rail- 
way tickets, umbrellas and automobiles — grow 
on bushes by the side of the road, and that, when 
you want anything, all you have to do is to stretch 
out your hand and pick it off. Yet, curiously 
enough, these persons, along with all others who 
will not work themselves, are never in favor of 
having all work abolished from the world. They 
know, deep down in the uncontaminated part of 
their nature, that life without work — without 
somebody's work — would be unbearable and im- 
possible; what they see clearest is that it would 
be uncomfortable. They do not really believe in 
the bush-by-the-side-of-the-road theory which 
they so eagerly maintain. 

And here comes in the meanness of such an 
attitude. They expert to profit by the work of 
somebody else; their plan is to do the spending, 
and let other people do the working; they are 
willing to be the paupers of society. The real 
pauper does not necessarily live in the almshouse 
or receive help from the town; he may live in a 
palace with plenty of money and an army of ser- 
vants. The word "pauper" means a poor man; 



68 THE LIFE THJlT COUNTS 

and what men are poorer than those who insist 
on having everything done for them, but do no- 
thing for others in return? The real pauper is the 
man who will not work when he has the ability 
to work; he is the man who takes more from the 
world than he is willing to give back to the world; 
the balance in life's account stands against him. 
We are all of us consumers; we consume food 
and clothes and fuel and books and a hundred 
other things; and right-minded people never get 
far in life before finding themselves confronted 
with the question of willingness to become pro- 
ducers also; that means work. What we consume 
was produced by work: whose work? If not ours, 
then what obligation rests on other people that 
does not rest on us, to do some of the produ- 
cing? "But," some one interposes, "I am not a 
beggar; I pay for what I have; I pay in money, 
and money represents work." "True," might 
come the rejoinder, "money does represent work; 
but have you ever considered the full meaning 
of that fad? Whose work do you have in mind? 
There never has been any work without a per- 
son behind it. The bit of money I hold in my 
hand is the hard work of a man in the hot sun, 
or at the bottom of a mine, or amid the perils of 
the sea, for a whole day; it is the work of a poor 
woman with her needle for three whole days; it 
is the work of a child, kept out of school, for an 
entire week. This bit of money begins to throb; 
there are heart-beats in it; what I hold here is a 
part of somebody's life; it is human toil and sacri- 



THE F^CE OF JIN OX 69 

fice; it is a sacred thing; I dare not treat it flip- 
pantly ; I must see that when it goes from me, 
it goes for a worthy object. Yes, money repre- 
sents work; but the question is, Does it represent 
any of your work?" 

The man who thinks he can discharge his obli- 
gations by paying in money for the things he re- 
ceives may be wide of the mark. If he earned the 
money, well and good; in that case it represents 
his work, and so far forth he has been a producer. 
If, however, it came to him by gift or inheritance, 
then for him to pay it out for the comforts and 
luxuries he wants is to appropriate the work, to 
use up a part of the life, of somebody else, and 
no true man will continue to do this without con- 
sidering what service, in one form or another, he 
is rendering in return. 

We may look at the matter in a still more con- 
crete form, and say to our moneyed friend: You 
wear out shoes: suppose you make a pair. You 
wear out clothes: suppose you make a dress, or 
a coat, or a hat. You break a pane of glass or 
tear a curtain: suppose you mend one. You ex- 
pert three meals a day : suppose you cook and 
serve them; or, to go further back, — since cook- 
ing and serving are the least part of the business, 
— suppose you sow and harvest the wheat, plant 
and dig the potatoes, feed and milk the cow and 
churn the butter. Somebody must do it. Of course 
it is not meant that every one need do just these 
particular things; it is meant that every one, ac- 
cording to his ability and opportunity, ought to 



70 THE LIFE TH<AT COUNTS 

do some particular things that will be of value 
to human life and make it worth while for society 
to have him in its membership. 

Theodore Roosevelt, in one of those utter- 
ances for which he is noted concerning moral 
condud, says, "Pull your own weight." That 
means work. And it is a poor sort of man who 
would not be willing to do as much work as that. 
Somebody has described the different attitudes 
which people assume toward work by a story from 
the old stage-coach times. When a certain driver 
came to a hard place in the road, he pulled in his 
horses, and said: "First-class passengers keep 
their seats; second-class passengers get out and 
walk; third-class passengers get out and push/' 
That is about the way it is in this world. And yet 
any man who is worth his salt neither keeps his 
seat nor walks ; he does some of the pushing. 

It is a great thing for a man to find his work 
in life, and when he has found it to do it. We 
cannot all do the same things, but we can all do 
something to make the world we live in a better 
world. We have for our examples plenty of men 
and women, in every walk and calling, who work, 
and work hard, but do not work for money alone; 
they work because they see the need of the world, 
and, like the Son of Man, came not to be min- 
istered unto, but to minister. 



THE FvfCE OF ^N OX 



ii 




E are not quite done with the face 
of an ox. The patient beast will 
let us detain him a bit longer. 
But, first of all, there is need of 
making a disclaimer at this point. 
1 1 may have been surmised that in 
urging so many strenuous things 
we mean to leave no place in the good life for 
recreation and play. Such an intention is farthest 
from the fa6t. Play is an essential condition of 
good work and wholesome living. The bow that 
is never unbent will lose its power. If we say less 
about play than about work, it is because play 
will generally take care of itself; work requires 
looking after. 

In a world where work is the business and play 
the vacation of life, it is no part of wisdom to re- 
verse the case by making play the business and 
work the vacation. The growing tendency to dis- 
turb the proportion, and let pleasure as such en- 
croach on the rightful domain of more serious 
things, is attracting the attention of thoughtful 
minds. If a visitor from the neighboring planet 
Mars were to spend a week among us reading 
the newspapers, what would he be likely to re- 



72 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

port to his Martian friends as apparently the 
chief end of life on the Earth? If he said money 
and amusement, such a verdid: could hardly be 
set aside as not in accord with the evidence spread 
before him in the daily press. 

In this great country of ours, with its boundless 
resources and its well-to-do population, every- 
thing is made easy and comfortable in the home, 
in the school, in the business world, to a degree 
that would astonish the people of two or three 
generations ago, if only they could look in upon 
us now. This, no doubt, is a cause for profound 
gratitude. At the same time, if it produces a re- 
laxation of effort and an aversion to honest work, 
then such prosperity becomes an unmitigated ca- 
lamity. It means a reduftion of life. Some of the 
noblest qualities of the human soul can be kept 
alive and be developed only by the experience 
that comes through effort and work. That emi- 
nent psychologist, Professor William James of 
Harvard University, says on this point: "Keep 
the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gra- 
tuitous exercise every day. That is, be systemati- 
cally ascetic or heroic in little, unnecessary points; 
do every day or two something for no other rea- 
son than that you would rather not do it; so that, 
when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may 
find you not unnerved and untrained to stand 
the test." Such advice from such a source is both 
suggestive and refreshing in these hedonistic 
times. Some years ago a high prelate of the Ro- 
man Catholic Church was quoted as having ex- 



THE FtACE OF JtN OX 73 

pressed the opinion that war is a good thing for a 
country about once in a generation for the sake of 
the manly qualities of patriotism, effort and self- 
sacrifice which it calls forth. That is not very dif- 
ferent from what Tennyson teaches in his beau- 
tiful poem "Maud." Perhaps neither prelate nor 
poet intended to be taken too literally. And yet, 
when some great principle compels the issue, 
even war with all its sufferings is far less an evil 
than is a self-seeking life of pleasure and money- 
getting, or an oyster-like life of ease and indif- 
ference. 

It is for play, then, to be the servant but not 
the master of one's life. "Sir," said Herbert 
Spencer to a foppish clubman who prided him- 
self on his skill at billiards, "to play a good game 
of billiards is the mark of a well rounded edu- 
cation ; to play too good a game is the mark of an 
ill spent youth." After all is said and done, we 
feel that the main part of life should be given to 
something nobler than mere amusement. The 
waves toss idly at the surface, but the deep cur- 
rents move toward definite ends. "It is not to 
taste sweet things," says Carlyle, "but to do 
noble and true deeds, and vindicate himself un- 
der God's heaven as a God-made man, that the 
poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the 
way of doing that, and the dullest day-drudge 
kindles into a hero." 

When one really enrolls himself among the 
world's workers, he loyally accepts the fadt that 
there is no way of doing work except by working. 



74 THE LIFE TH<AT COUNTS 

If after a time the work he once shrank from 
becomes easy and as agreeable to him as play, so 
much the better; but he did not make that the 
condition of accepting it. If one has a room to 
sweep or a cord of wood to saw, it will not help 
matters to make believe that the broom is a golf 
stick or the saw a tennis racquet. All sugar-coat- 
ing of necessary tasks may be left to those whose 
wills are weak. When a true man has anything 
to do he will stand up and do it in a manly way. 
And he will do it thoroughly. This is an im- 
portant part of the business, so often it happens 
that the two paths that lead, the one to success 
and the other to failure, diverge at this point. 
" Does he do thorough work ? " That is the ques- 
tion which the employer wants answered. There 
are times when it is wise to let well enough alone, 
but there are more times when that proverb is 
seized upon as an excuse for doing with indiffer- 
ence what ought to be done with thoroughness. 
Half-done, slipshod, indifferent work is as bad 
as no work at all, and frequently worse. A ship 
founders, a bridge falls, a building collapses, a 
theatre burns, with fearful loss of life, and too 
often the reason is that some contractor, or work- 
man, or inspector, only half did his work. It 
would make us more painstaking, perhaps, if we 
would bear in mind that there are far-reaching 
consequences for good or evil to others as well 
as to ourselves, not only from the work we do, 
but from the way we do it. A ship is wrecked 
off the coast, with a hundred souls aboard. They 



THE F^CE OF *sfN OX 75 

succeed in getting aline to the shore: the ques- 
tion now is, Will the line hold? Everything de- 
pends on how the man in the ropewalk did his 
work. He had gone to his work one day, poor 
man, thinking how little he could do in the world 
— only stepping back and forth, back and forth, 
monotonously twisting ropes — and wondering 
if it really made much difference in what way he 
did that little. Nevertheless, he determined to 
be scrupulously faithful, even in the little things, 
and he never knew that on that day he saved a 
hundred lives. There are two ways, the slipshod 
way and the thorough way, of sweeping a floor, 
of darning a stocking, of writing a letter, of get- 
ting a lesson, or of doing anything, even of shut- 
ting a door, and we must not delude ourselves 
with the idea that it makes no difference which 
of those two ways we pradtice. The student who 
goes to college gets a new light on the value of 
thoroughness in preparation. And when he goes 
out into the world he will find himself helped 
or hindered according to the way he did things 
in school or college. 

The word "drudgery" does not suggest any- 
thing very inspiring, but it describes something 
very necessary. Nobody likes drudgery, but every 
useful person must encounter it. Some forms of 
work reward the worker as he goes along; the 
artist rejoices to see the portrait take shape and 
beauty under his hand, the author his story, the 
architect his building; and yet, in each case, there 
is a vast deal of drudgery in the background 



76 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

somewhere. It is an accompaniment of all real 
work. It is a dry and thirsty land ; we pass through 
it because the road passes through it, in order 
to reach some better place beyond. No man ever 
accomplishes much until he acquires the fine art 
of meeting drudgery with an unruffled spirit. 
Thomas Carlyle may have been a bear in his 
manners, but when he had a task to perform, he 
could put on the oxlike face of slow, laborious 
toil, and keep it on until the task was done. The 
story is told of Sir Walter Scott that, after he 
had finished one of his great books, the huge 
pile of manuscript accidentally caught fire from 
an overturned candle and was totally destroyed. 
He had no other copy, and all there was to show 
for months of hard work was a pile of ashes. What 
did he do? He pulled himself together with grim 
determination, and with infinite patience recom- 
posed and rewrote the book from beginning to 
end. 

President Eliot is reported to have said that 
nine tenths of his time is given to drudgery. 
If that is true of the president of a great univer- 
sity, with its varied interests, what must be the 
life of the stoker on an ocean liner who does no- 
thing but shovel coal ; of a miner who enters the 
shaft before sunrise and leaves it after sunset 
without seeing the light of day for a week at a 
time; or of the seamstress whose "stitch, stitch, 
stitch" has received an immortal recognition in 
the poem of Thomas Hood? What of the poor 
woman who keeps the home for her fatherless 



THE F^CE OF ^N OX 77 

children, cooking, washing, mending, doing the 
thousand and one things her life requires, over 
and over again, day after day, year after year ? 
"I do believe,'' said Phillips Brooks, — and it is 
as true of a woman as of a man, — " I do believe 
the common man's task is the hardest. The hero 
has the hero's aspiration that lifts him to his 
labor. All great duties are easier than the little 
ones, though they cost far more blood and 
agony." 

And that is the way the Bible looks at it too. 
Isaiah says, speaking of those who wait upon 
the Lord, "They shall mount up with wings as 
eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and 
they shall walk, and not faint." Flying, running, 
walking: is the order correct? Yes, it goes from 
the easiest to the most difficult. " First the ideal," 
says George Adam Smith, "and then the rush 
at it with passionate eyes, and then the daily 
trudge onward." The eagle in us may mount up 
with wings, as a splendid dream; the lion in us 
may run forward, as enthusiasm in some inspir- 
ing occupation; but the patient ox in us must be 
content to walk, as unquestioning loyalty to the 
duties of everyday life. The climax is reached in 
the commonplace. We mount up with wings in 
order that we may run, and not be weary ; we 
run that we may walk, and not faint. 

"Tasks in hours of insight willed 
Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled" 

The monotony of repetition, the constant deal- 



78 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

ing with little things, when the goal is far off or 
out of sight, is what puts the stoutest heart to 
the test. And yet that is the test we are called 
to endure. A person's character is most clearly 
shown by the way he deals with the common- 
place. We must learn to meet the irksome or 
the ordinary in life with a determined will. It is 
not something to be avoided, but something to 
be overcome. It would be pleasanter, no doubt, 
to sketch landscapes and do fancywork than to 
dig potatoes and wash dishes, but there are times 
when it is not half so noble. The family needs 
something to eat, and a clean plate to eat it on, 
before it needs pictures and lace. The world is 
immensely enriched by its works of art, but it 
could get along without them better than with- 
out the common things which drudgery supplies. 
The late Joseph Parker of London once said 
this about work : " I saw upon the face of a watch 
three workers. There was a very thin one, so thin 
that I could barely see it, and it seemed to be 
moving in a little circle of its own, and to have 
nothing to do with the other workers. One of the 
other workers was long and genteel and graceful. 
The third worker was short and slow. I looked 
at them for a while, and I said, c There can be no 
doubt in the mind of any one who looks at this 
watch who the worker is : the worker is evidently 
that little one that moves in a circle of its own. 
I can see it move; it moves lightly, blithely, 
trippingly; I can see it. The long one I can 
hardly see move at all until I have been watch- 



THE FjICE OF <AN OX 79 

ing it for a considerable time; and as for the short 
one, I think I may safely declare that it does not 
move at all/ See how a stranger to the mechanism 
of a watch can talk; how ignorant he is of what 
the workers are doing! You may take off the little 
thin worker and do very little damage; you may 
even take off the long and graceful worker, and, 
though you will suffer a considerable injury, yet 
you can do without its service at all. But if you 
take off that little, short, slow worker, you could 
never tell the time of day." So important for the 
world is the slow, steady-going, unattractive, un- 
regarded work that if we were permitted to add 
a new saint to the calendar, we could hardly do 
better than to sele<5t some one worthy of the name 
of St. Drudgery. 

Work is a test of chara&er; drudgery in work 
is a greater test; but the supreme test is patience 
and perseverance in the task on which you have 
entered. It has passed into a proverb that the 
race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. 
It is his who keeps at it. An express train takes 
you more quickly to your destination, not because 
it runs faster, but because it makes fewer stops, 
than other trains. " An engine of one cat-power 
running all the time," said George William Cur- 
tis, "is more effective than one of forty horse- 
power standing idle." Justin McCarthy, asking 
General Grant what he considered the first re- 
quisite of a general, received the reply : " Pa- 
tience." General Grant was the man who had 
said at a critical time, " I will fight it out on this 



8o THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

line if it takes all summer." Tamerlane, the great 
Oriental conqueror, is said to have taken a lesson 
in patience one day from an ant that he watched 
trying to carry a little burden up a small in- 
cline. The ant made sixty-nine unsuccessful at- 
tempts, falling back each time just as he neared 
the top, but the seventieth carried him over the 
obstruction and sent him on his way. It is a 
noble saying, which comes to us from the wis- 
dom of the East, that heroism is patience for one 
moment more. 

The history of discovery, of invention, of the 
accomplishment of great purposes, is the old 
story, over and over again, of patience and per- 
severance. All things are possible to the man who 
works and waits. "They will hear me yet," said 
the young Disraeli, as he was laughed down in his 
first speech before Parliament; and they did. The 
charm of the Odyssey is in the way its hero holds 
to his purpose through every baffling circum- 
stance, and reaches his goal at last. The difference 
between Columbus and his men lay in the fad: 
that their perseverance gave out, while his never 
faltered. 

" He gained a world; he gave that world 
Its grandest lesson : c On ! sail on/'" 

Laura Bridgman and Helen Kellar are famous 
names in the history of education ; what they have 
achieved, being deaf and dumb and blind, is pro- 
perly regarded as marvelous. But the greater 
marvel is found in their teachers. Dr. Howe was 



THE FjtCE OF rfN OX 81 

the Columbus in finding a way to the imprisoned 
soul; and Miss Sullivan nobly followed along 
the same path. Everything was due to infinite 
patience and heroic perseverance. Twenty years 
ago, as Jacob Riis tells the story, two wealthy 
highborn young men entered political life in New 
York City at the same time. One of them, meet- 
ing with obstacles, became disgusted and with- 
drew; the other, in spite of obstacles equally 
great, kept bravely on. To-day the former is a 
self-expatriated American, living in Europe for 
his own pleasure; the latter is President of the 
United States, and is living for service to his 
country. 

But in spite of all the accumulated wisdom of 
the past, in spite of the innumerable shining ex- 
amples of what perseverance alone will do, we 
still find that the commonest defeat of charafter 
to-day is fickleness of purpose. Most persons 
make a good beginning, but do not hold out. The 
minds of some are like humming birds that flit 
from flower to flower; they are caught by what- 
ever looks attractive for the moment, and are 
then off again before we know it. There are per- 
sons who desire an education, for example, but 
have no idea of the work it involves; they do not 
see, perhaps, why it should involve any; they 
have not considered that part of the business. 
They undertake mathematics, it may be, but 
presently when tribulation or persecution arises, 
they conclude that their minds are not properly 
organized for mathematical activities. They turn 



82 THE LIFE TH^iT COUNTS 

to German, and in a short time they find that 
German has its snares and pitfalls and impene- 
trable thickets. They flee, next, to the pleasant 
land of literature and history, but soon discover 
that even there some days are dark and dreary. 
Perhaps they abandon the idea of an education 
and go into business, first one kind and then a 
different kind. But this only makes another chap- 
ter of the same old story ; that everlasting ne- 
cessity to work and fight and overcome some- 
thing meets them at every turn; like the old 
navigators of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 
turies, they are trying to find some easy way to 
the Indies, and it takes them a lifetime to learn 
that there is no easy way to any desirable goal. 
This they might have known at the start; the 
world of experience has been shouting it into 
men's ears for countless generations; Plato said, 
twenty-five hundred years ago, that all noble 
things are difficult to do; it is idle to seek the 
nobility without mastering the difficulty; the 
thing is simply impossible. 

But perhaps we should feel most sympathy 
for those persons who have a strong definite pur- 
pose and just miss the complete triumph; they 
possess the right idea and mean to work; they 
keep hopefully and bravely on for a long, long 
time, and then, all of a sudden, their courage 
fails; they give up the game when they are really 
near the goal; how near they can never know; 
a little further effort and the prize would have 
been theirs; they just fall short of the heroic, 



THE F^CE OF ^N OX 83 

because they lacked the patience for one moment 
more. 

" Oh, the little more, and how much it is, 
And the little less, and what worlds away ! " 

Many a ship is wrecked on the rock that stands 
not far from the harbor; the name of the rock 
is "Almost." It makes less difference than one 
thinks what worthy task he undertakes provided 
he perseveres to the end. All roads of worthy 
and conscientious effort come out at the same 
point — success. 

The New Testament returns again and again 
to this theme of perseverance. Everybody that 
would live the true life is warned of its difficul- 
ties; he must count the cost at the start like the 
man who would build a tower, lest the work be 
left undone; the disciple who puts his hand to 
the plow and looks back is not fit for the king- 
dom of God; the crown is for him that over- 
cometh; the glad thought of the Son of Man 
was that he had finished the work that had been 
given him to do. 

Learn, then, the lesson of the face of an ox. 
Work while it is day. "Rest elsewhere," was the 
noble motto of one of the great Netherland 
statesmen who resisted the domination of Philip 
of Spain. Do not be afraid of hard work and slow 
work and dull work. Stick to the task you have 
chosen. Stick-to-it-iveness, as an old teacher used 
to call it, — patient continuance in well-doing, as 
the Bible describes it, — will do more for any one 



84 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

than unregulated enthusiasm. Blessed are they 
that endure to the end. 



THE FtsfCE OF <JN E*AQLE 

i 




EARS ago I used to spend my 
summer vacations on a beautiful 
island off the coast of Maine. 
The island was shaped somewhat 
like the capital letter H, and one 
of its proje&ing points was a high 
rocky promontory which, with its 
wild retirement and its tall, dead trees, afforded 
an excellent home for eagles. Many a time, as I 
looked across the intervening bay, have I seen 
one of those strong-winged birds launch out into 
the open heaven and sail away toward the main- 
land till he dwindled to a speck and finally dis- 
appeared. He swept the miles behind him with 
such ease and rapidity that I wondered how it 
would seem to travel in that way, and to see the 
world from an eagle's point of view. The petty 
things that annoy us here could not follow us; 
they never rise more than a few feet from the 
surface of the earth. We should be the slaves of 
no time-tables up there in the clear sky, and we 
should find no toil or drudgery; all would be 
light and air and freedom and gladness. 

Such is the pi&ure that comes to my mind with 
great vividness in connection with this chapter 



86 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

on the face of an eagle. What will here be said 
may seem to contradict in part some of our pre- 
vious conclusions; but the contradiction is only 
apparent. It was felt, no doubt, that the lionlike 
and oxlike features of service pictured life as a 
very strenuous affair; and so they did; that is 
what life is — the life that is worth anything. Our 
Lord took particular pains — he almost seemed 
to go out of his way at times — to explain to any 
new disciple the difficulties and dangers that be- 
set the path. He wanted no follower who could 
not make up his mind to meet them with a brave 
heart. The greatest of the apostles chose the 
figures of the footrace and the battle — the two 
most strenuous exercises in which the men of his 
day engaged — to indicate the nature of the true 
life. Let no one make the mistake of thinking 
goodness the path of least resistance and so 
choosing it on that ground, as college students 
sometimes choose their eleCtives. The good life 
means hard work. 

At the same time, there is another phase — or, 
as we have been calling it, another face — of this 
important matter. The life of work and self-de- 
nial has its great compensations and its hidden 
sources of strength. No man who really leads 
such a life would for one moment think of ex- 
changing it for any other. The heaven where 
there is nothing to do but "loaf around the 
throne" would be no heaven to him. He would 
follow the example of the sailors in Kipling's 
" Last Chantey," who flung down their golden 



THE FACE OF <AN EAQLE 87 

harps and made for the open sea, with all its perils 
and privations. What we need is not so much 
rest from labor as rest in labor. It makes no dif- 
ference how great the task, if only our hearts are 
greater. The question is not what effort we are 
called upon to use, but what reserve of power 
there is behind the effort and what ideal we are 
striving to attain. These are the things that keep 
our hearts up. In one of Raphael's paintings of 
St. Michael and the Dragon, the archangel is 
given a serene, almost pleasant expression, such 
as you might expedt after the vidtory instead of 
in the midst of the conflict. But what you see in 
his face is the serenity of righteousness ; it springs 
from confidence in a reserve of power that is 
more than equal to the task and that renders the 
vi&ory already assured. One of those huge steam 
hammers which are used in the manufa&ure of 
steel can strike a blow sufficient, as you would 
almost believe, to smash a battleship ; it can also 
descend gently enough to drive a tack, or press 
the crystal on the face of a watch. Consider the 
great rivers of the world, as they move seaward 
with an ever increasing, irresistible flood. The 
Amazon rolls as far as from California to Maine, 
its mouth is almost as wide as the distance from 
Boston to Portland, and it pushes its way into 
the great deep for two hundred miles: whence 
came this mighty power? From the springs in 
the hills; from the silent, invisible mist; from 
the all-surrounding atmosphere where the sun 
shines, and the cloud gathers, and the eagle flies. 



88 THE LIFE THJtT COUNTS 

And so it is with all the power we see; it comes 
from what is out of sight; oftentimes, from what 
is out of sight and far away. Have you ever pene- 
trated the depths of a great forest? How still it 
seems ! You think of the trees, perhaps, as doing 
nothing at all, they seem always to be waiting, 
as Mr. Emerson said. But are they doing no- 
thing at all? They are sucking juices up from the 
soil, breathing gases in from the air, absorbing 
sunlight out of the sky; they are building layer 
over layer of little cells of growth, and these mil- 
lions on millions of little cells are continually 
throbbing with the energy drawn from the sun. 
But you do not hear them ; you look on the trees 
and say, "How still it seems !" Ages and ages 
ago there were forests of this kind which gradu- 
ally sank and became covered over with debris; 
they lay in the earth, pressed down deep and 
hard, for countless years, till man appeared and 
finally began to dig them up, piece by piece ; and 
from those black shiny lumps, when put into 
our furnaces, comes the energy which drives the 
steamships and railway trains and ele&ric cars of 
the world ; which turns the wheels in thousands 
of mills and manufactories, and lights and warms 
our houses. What does the world's work to-day 
is that primeval sunlight which the trees absorbed 
from the fountains of the sky and stored so 
quietly for future use. This shows what the trees 
were doing, when if you could have stood among 
them you would have said, "They are doing 
nothing at all; how still it seems!" 



THE FACE OF <AN EAQLE 89 

Take one more example. If you visit a great 
commercial city during its business hours, you 
find it a beehive of activity . But towards night 
the traffic slackens, the roar in the streets grows 
less and less, and fifty thousand men lay down 
their work and disappear in all dire&ions. The 
next morning they return from the quiet and 
peace of fifty thousand different homes, refreshed 
and strengthened for another day. Has that brief 
absence meant nothing? It has meant the power 
to work. 

If we are to be worth anything to ourselves 
or others, we must have our times of stillness 
and retirement. All the power employed in the 
world is derived from some fountain of power 
above the world. The spirit in man needs ready 
and continual access to the sources of spiritual 
life. The living creature of Ezekiel's Vision can 
never dispense with the face of an eagle. 

First of all, as a preliminary condition of ac- 
quiring those eagle-like qualities which the sym- 
bol contemplates, every person should learn the 
value of sometimes being alone. Swallows that 
skim the surface fly in companies; the eagle flies 
alone. We have already referred to the value of 
mingling with other people, of extending one's 
self horizontally, so to speak; that constitutes 
the social self, and an important self it is. We 
are now referring to the value of extending one's 
self perpendicularly ; that means the individual 
self, which is no less important than the other. 
It was intended that we should grow in both 



go THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

dire&ions. We must take a little time, then, with 
ourselves ; we must sit down with our thoughts, 
with our dreams, with our consciences. Some 
people never seem to meet themselves in a quiet 
and friendly way; they are always at the club, 
at the party, at the theatre; always somewhere 
in the crowd, when they are not at work or asleep; 
they do not like to be alone. But if one does not 
find that he is agreeable company for himself, 
how can he ever exped to be for other people? 
It is the enrichment of the individual self that 
gives value and power to the social self. Wis- 
dom cries after the man who would serve his 
fellows to look well to the resources within. Un- 
less he keeps these replenished he will have 
nothing to bestow. We should pray, as Socrates 
did, for beauty in the inward soul. 

The men who have contributed most to the 
world have made much of the still hour. The 
Son of Man went up into a mountain alone; 
St. Paul withdrew into the desert alone; St. John 
sat by the seashore of Patmos alone. The moun- 
tain of prayer, the desert of meditation, and the 
island of vision have been mighty factors in the 
progress of the world. Truth, wisdom, inspira- 
tion, are forever flowing in from the quiet places 
and the lonely places — from the study, the la- 
boratory, the cloister, the chamber of prayer — 
to sweeten and purify the stream of human life. 

Meditation, of which our fathers made so 
much, has become with us almost a lost art. The 
things that require time and thought and care, 



THE FACE OF <AN EAQLE 91 

or that offer no money return, stand a poor 
chance in the hurry and bustle of modern life. 
And, in the case of meditation, the worst of it 
is that we are losing not only the art but the 
desire. We prefer to take a thing for granted 
rather than sit down and think it out. We doom 
ourselves in this way to mental and spiritual 
poverty. We must recover the desire and the art 
of deriving satisfaction and enjoyment from our 
own minds. Better is some thought of our own 
— a thought we have made a friend of — than a 
legion of thoughts which belong to other people 
and afford us only a bowing acquaintance. 

The face of an eagle symbolizes aspiration — 
that energy in the soul which lifts one to broader 
horizons, nobler conduit and richer enjoyment. 
This means the recognition and love of the ideal. 
It means something like 

" The desire of the moth for the star y 
Of the night for the morrow; 
A devotion to something afar?* 

There appeared some months ago a remarkable 
newspaper article, in which the writer — a promi- 
nent leader in the labor world — set before work- 
ing men, as the chief objedts of ambition, larger 
pay and shorter hours. Of anything beyond that 
he had absolutely nothing to say. He spoke as 
if he regarded those two obje&s as ends in them- 
selves instead of means to some further ends. 
There was an utter absence of all idealism. And 
yet no amount of leisure or creature comforts 



92 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

can ever make life worth the living if that is the 
whole of life. The life which does not aspire 
beyond the line of material things is poverty- 
stricken indeed. Are we not here to see the beau- 
tiful world, and to think God's thoughts after 
him, and to feel the workings of love in our 
hearts, and to do what is noble and kind? Have 
the stars and the trees and the rivers and the 
hills no message for us? Do we find nothing of 
interest in the creations of art, in literature, in 
history, in the lives of heroic men? Do the ap- 
peals of patriotism and philanthropy fall dead 
in our ears? Surely, we hope not. Rome perished 
not from lack of wealth, but from lack of ideals. 
When the idle populace cared for nothing but 
bread and the games, — or, in modern language, 
for physical comfort and amusement, — then, no 
matter how lavishly these were supplied, the em- 
pire was doomed. It was an ancient belief that 
so long as the gods remained in a city, the city 
was safe; when the gods withdrew, it meant that 
the city was about to fall. The ideals of a people 
or of a person are the gods that give security or 
ruin according as they stay or go. The moment 
our ideals depart, life sinks below the line where 
it may be called life ; it becomes merely existence 
like the life of the brute. 

One should cling to his ideals, then. He should 
see that he has ideals to cling to — some worthy 
objeds of thought and aspiration. If the world 
as we see it were the only world open to us, our 
condition would be forlorn enough ; but it is not 



THE FACE OF JIN EAQLE 93 

the only one, or the best one ; we have the privi- 
lege of wandering at will through the world of 
our ideals and of bringing therefrom whatever 
we like of its richness and fulness to round out 
and beautify the world of our everyday life. The 
Golden Rule, the Twenty-third Psalm, the story 
of Joseph or of Ruth, the courage and perseve- 
rance of Ulysses, the sentiment of such a poem 
as Susan Coolidge's " Every day is a fresh be- 
ginning," — any one of these things, or of others 
like them, might supply just the help and good 
cheer needed for the daily task. The world of 
toil and traffic and disappointment surges all 
about us ; but the realm of our better thoughts, 
like some quiet cathedral that stands on a noisy 
street, is always near and always accessible. It is 
a great thing to be able to enter the company of 
our ideals for a moment, and refresh our hearts 
with the very images of things as they ought to 
be. The world can never quite overcome us so 
long as this refuge remains; and the chances are 
that we shall find strength enough there to over- 
come the world. 

Ideals, it should be remembered, are not al- 
together the impalpable and visionary things they 
seem. They are not bodiless spirits that flit about 
the world and neither take nor desire any part 
in a&ual life. They are very human; they are 
always trying to embody themselves in persons ; 
and, in fa6t, they get their strongest influence 
over us in that way. To associate with persons 
who are older, or wiser, or nobler than ourselves 



94 THE LIFE TH*AT COUNTS 

— with those who have achieved what we should 
like to have achieved, or who are what we should 
like to be, in skill, or knowledge, or character — 
means always an increase of power. The teacher, 
or pastor, or friend, whom we "look up to " with 
love and respect, stands for an embodied ideal, 
and silently helps lift us to a higher plane. Op- 
portunities for association of this sort no one can 
afford to negleft. 

And especially should we cultivate a fellow- 
ship with the great and good minds of the past. 
That too means power. But why emphasize the 
past? Because there the opportunity is so great. 
The past, once so passionate and full of strife, 
is free of all prejudice now; the smoke of the 
battle has died away; the artificial distinctions 
between man and man that perplex the present 
are forever abolished in the great, silent, demo- 
cratic past! There the characters of men stand 
out and are valued for what they are ; we may 
choose whom we will for our friends and choose 
understandingly as well. 

In the city of Florence there is a long, wide 
portico or colonnade, which extends back from 
the river bank between two lofty, palatial build- 
ings to the great square in front of the old town 
hall. Both sides of it are adorned with marble 
statues of men illustrious for what they have 
done. All these men represent the same bit of 
territory on the world's map; most of them — 
Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, 
Dante, Petrarch, Amerigo Vespucci, and Galileo 



THE FACE OF <AN EAQLE 95 

among the number — have acquired a world-wide 
fame; and their statues thus brought together 
constitute an imposing array. One may imagine 
that no Tuscan acquainted with his country's 
history can walk through that colonnade and be- 
hold those faces looking down upon him in the 
stillness of the place without experiencing a thrill 
of emotion and an uplift of moral power. The 
west front of Salisbury Cathedral is covered with 
statues, tier on tier, representing the different 
classes of persons referred to in the most glorious 
hymn of the Christian Church. This silent Te 
Deum in stone, whence prophets, apostles and 
martyrs look out upon the world, is quite as im- 
pressive, perhaps, as the music itself of the hymn 
when rolled through the cathedral arches from 
the voices and instruments within. The eleventh 
chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, like the 
Florentine colonnade or the cathedral front, is 
filled with human figures. There stand the heroes 
of the nation — in their several niches, as it were 
— ministering the comfort of faith and courage 
and inspiration to all who come. No people ever 
understood so well as the Hebrews did the value 
of an ideal as exhibited in a personal life. To them 
the past — the personalized past — was always a 
living power. The writer meant it when he said 
that Abel, being dead, yet speaketh. When the 
Son of Man found little sympathy in his own 
time, he turned to the past; he was sure of the 
good men there who had lived and suffered, as 
he was doing, for righteousness' sake; he made 



96 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

Moses and Elijah his familiar friends; they could 
understand him if the world could not. 

As a matter of fad, we are cultivating a fel- 
lowship with either the good or the bad men of 
the past every day of our lives. If you do a cruel 
thing, Nero smiles on you; if you do a mean or 
insincere thing, Judas beckons you ; if you do a 
cowardly thing, Pilate welcomes you. "Come," 
they cry, "you belong with us." And so you do, 
in so far as you are guilty of the same sort of 
wrong-doing as stigmatizes them. If, on the other 
hand, you stand for truth and righteousness and 
courage and helpfulness and hope, the prophets 
approve you, the apostles are with you, Socrates 
stretches to you his hand; so do Ambrose and 
Augustine and Savonarola and Wyclif and Wil- 
liam the Silent and Washington and Channing 
and Phillips Brooks; all the good men and wo- 
men of all the ages take you for a friend; and 
the Son of Man himself, standing at the head 
of so glorious a company, greets you with his 
"Well done." This is the fellowship into which 
we may enter on the one condition that we make 
ourselves worthy of it. These are the lives that 
have been put to the test and not found want- 
ing. If, in our moments of trial and temptation, 
we remember them, we shall in that way touch 
the hem of their garments and feel a virtue go 
out from them into us. 



THE FtACE OF <AN E<AQLE 
ii 




HIS chapter has to do with the 
companionship of books, of na- 
ture, and of God, — three sources 
of power to which the individual 
finds readiest access when he is 
alone; they minister to the as- 
piring life of the spirit; it is still 
the face of an eagle. 

Of all inanimate things a good book is surely 
the most like a person; it comes the nearest to 
being alive with a human soul; it is a house or 
palace of glass through whose transparent walls 
we behold the man who wrote it; he is always 
within; we discern his varying emotions; what he 
felt and thought, what he liked or disliked, what 
he was and aspired to be — all this is visible; 
the immortal part of him is there. And so our 
minds come into contact with his mind; we re- 
cognize some of our own thoughts and feelings 
which he has expressed so well; they are com- 
mon to the race, and that is why they survive. 
If we should stop to think about it, we should 
seldom enter a great library without a sense of 
reverence, almost of awe. A library is the temple 
of humanity, as a cathedral is the temple of God. 



98 THE LIFE TH*AT COUNTS 

We stand there in the presence of the ages; we 
are surrounded by the hopes and fears, the as- 
pirations and struggles, the triumphs and disap- 
pointments, the crimes, sorrows and heroic deeds 
of all mankind. Millions of human personalities, 
in an endlessly receding line that melts away from 
the glare of to-day into the shadows of the re- 
motest yesterday, peer out upon us from behind 
every book. We can almost hear, in that quiet 
place, the heart-throbs of all the generations of 
the world. 

It is said that over fourteen million books have 
been published since the invention of printing. 
We cannot read them all. We have probably 
never seen even the outside of one million. In 
our whole lifetime we shall read but a few hun- 
dred at most, and of these the books we want 
to make friends of, and seek the company of 
again and again, will numberless than a score — 
a merest drop in the ocean. It is necessary to se- 
lect them wisely, for seledt we must. 

The building which contains the Boston pub- 
lic library covers an area of perhaps fifty thou- 
sand square feet, and the library numbers over 
eight hundred thousand volumes. But the gist 
of all that is there — the essentials of the world's 
literature — would make scarcely more than an 
armful. Almost any one can own the world's best 
books. Among them would be the Bible, Homer 
and Plato, Virgil and Dante, Shakespeare and 
Milton ; and, though he were allowed but a single 
armful, he should try very hard to include a few 



THE FACE OF JIN EAQLE 99 

more, as, for example, Browning, Tennyson, 
Walter Scott, Viftor Hugo, and our own Emer- 
son. Whoever knows these dozen books or au- 
thors, as friend knows friend, is rich in the goods 
of the spirit ; whoever knows none of them , though 
he has read a cartload of modern fi6tion, is wretch- 
edly poor. 

Quality rather than quantity is the rule to be 
observed when we are reading for power, It is 
better to know five books well than to know ten 
thousand superficially. Scarcely one person in a 
generation can read and assimilate everything 
as Macaulay did. We must keep within limits. 
Newspapers and magazines, as valuable as they 
are, will never make up for the friendship of a 
few good books. The touch-and-go, hop-skip- 
and-jump method of reading means a diminish- 
ing power of concentration and therefore waste- 
fulness in the end. Virgil, in order to describe a 
perturbed and wavering mind that had a different 
purpose for every minute, compares it to an agi- 
tated basin of water that reflects the sunlight in 
a thousand different directions. The mind which 
reads only the periodicals, or which keeps a con- 
tinuous panorama of new stories passing before 
it, might be described in much the same way; 
whereas the reading and re-reading of some great 
book has a tendency to give the mind definite 
ideals and stability of purpose, making it more 
like an Alpine lake into whose calm depths fall 
the images of mountains and stars. 

Here, then, are a few maxims: Do not con- 

LOFC. 



ioo THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

fine your reading to any one kind of literature. 
The Bible — the cream of the literature of the 
Hebrew people — constitutes the greatest book 
of culture which the world has seen. Make much 
of history; there you will discover the tide in 
human affairs which the Power that "makes for 
righteousness ,, diredts and impels. Give a large 
place to biography; in that way you will come 
closest to the good lives of the past that are 
capable of moulding yours. Such a book as Plu- 
tarch's " Lives " is a gold mine of charader. Read 
a little poetry every day. Poetry is a spiritual 
tonic which is greatly needed in this prosaic 
money-getting age. It holds the true riches of 
beauty and truth. Everybody can learn to distin- 
guish it from its counterfeit, and to profit by it 
and derive pleasure from it as well. 

A safe, general maxim is this : You may read 
what you like after you have acquired a liking 
for what bears the stamp of time's approval. Do 
not feel ashamed to confess that you have not 
read the latest book about which your friends 
are talking. Know a few of the great books of the 
past, know them well, and you can let "David 
Harum"or"Mrs. Wiggsof the Cabbage Patch" 
wait your convenience. Read the authors them- 
selves rather than what other people have written 
about them; the critics are not nearly so useful 
or so necessary as they seem. Own the books which 
you take most into your life. Have them in good 
bindings — rather expensive bindings, if you can. 
You will in this way learn to treat them better 



THE FACE OF *AN EAQLE 101 

and to feel greater respedt for their personality. 
Remember, finally, that no vast amount of lei- 
sure is required for making one a well-read per- 
son. Use the scraps and fragments of time — five 
minutes here or ten minutes there — and the re- 
sult will surprise you at the end of a year. 

And now as to nature: Make friends with na- 
ture. We should not think of nature as only so 
much dead material — wood and dirt and rock 
and water. We should think of it as something 
wonderful, something alive with a spirit that can 
sympathize with our spirit. The old myth-makers 
were not wholly wrong; they peopled the woods 
and streams and ocean depths and mountain 
heights with beings akin to themselves; when a 
tree rustled, or a storm arose, or a meteor fell, it 
was not something that caused it, it was some- 
body; an invisible person was there. 

When the world looks at nature with the com- 
mercial eye or with the scientific eye — and these 
are the two eyes through which the world does 
most of its looking nowadays— it sees very little 
of what it needs most to see. Commercially, a tree 
is a mast, or a beam, or a pile of boards, or a pile 
of firewood ; a meadow is hay and butter ; a cata- 
ract is a sawmill, or a cotton mill, or an eledxic 
lighting plant; a mountain is one of the assets of 
a summer hotel. Scientifically, all the flowers in 
the world are merely botanical specimens; all the 
rocks and hills are geological specimens; all the 
trees and stars are things for one to guess the 
names of and put to the test of the book to see 



102 THE LIFE THJIT COUNTS 

if they are proper trees or proper stars. 

The eye one needs to look at nature with, for 
the purpose here described, is the eye of the 
imagination. That is about the only eye that ever 
sees anything clearly and "sees it whole." Its vi- 
sion, though considerably blurred in the case of 
most people, is susceptible of cultivation. Look 
for the beautiful and you will find it in unsus- 
pected places. It is not necessary to know the 
botanical name and family of a flower before you 
can see its beauty. Our Lord did not say, "Ana- 
lyze the lilies ;" he said, "Consider the lilies." 
Consider them in their wholeness; Solomon in 
all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 
Consider the trees; with their many moods and 
voices they are almost human. Consider the vast 
deep as you stand by the shore; hear it whisper of 
infinite and eternal things. Consider the moun- 
tains; let their spirit lift you into the atmosphere 
of all that is pure and noble. Consider the stars ; 
they shine untroubled, no matter what tempests 
are raging here. 

St. Francis of Assisi drew a world of comfort 
from his communion with nature. The sun was 
his great shining brother, and the moon his fair 
shining sister. Wind, river, rock, tree, flower, 
cloud, fire, frost — these were his brothers, or sis- 
ters. The birds, too, were his brothers, and he 
preached to them. He was himself Little Brother 
Francis to everybody and everything. That is a 
rare and beautiful spirit in which to go through 
the world, is it not? It helped St. Francis to do his 



THE FACE OF *AN EAQLE 103 

work as one of the great servants of humanity. 
Remember, too, how the ancient Hebrews 
looked at nature. Visible things were only the 
signs and symbols through which they saw the 
invisible. In the mountains round about Jeru- 
salem they beheld the everlasting arms of the 
Lord about his people. They discerned his faith- 
fulness in the stars. Think what this meant to 
them in the dreary days of their exile. They had 
been carried away as captives across the vast 
Asiatic plains ; with tear-dimmed eyes they had 
watched their holy city and beloved mountains 
sink below the horizon as if forever; they were 
strangers and slaves in great Babylon, where daily 
they witnessed the power and pomp and idol- 
atry of their oppressors. Their hearts yearned 
for home: when would the Lord restore them? 
That generation passed; and so did the next. 
Had the Lord forgotten his people? There were 
no mountains now to remind them of the ever- 
lasting arms. But they could look up into the 
sky. From the dark wicked streets of Babylon 
they beheld the stars; they noticed that all the 
stars were in their places; not one was missing; 
whoever cared for the stars was like a faithful 
shepherd, bringing them out by number, calling 
them all by name. Then they remembered that 
the Shepherd of the stars was their Shepherd, 
too; he had not, therefore, forgotten Israel; he 
would never let Israel drop out and be lost. And 
reasoning thus they found a mighty comfort in 
the stars. 



104 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

When you do right the world may sometimes 
be against you; but the stars are for you, and the 
mountains, and the trees. Jesus Christ walked 
everywhere as in his Father's house; he found 
nature alive with sympathy. An American poet, 
in some beautiful lines, has represented him as 
comforted and strengthened for his work by com- 
panionship with the trees : 

" Into the woods my Master went. 
Clean forspent, forspent. 
Into the woods my Master came. 
Forspent with love and shame. 
But the olives, they were not blind to him, 
The little grey leaves were kind to him, 
The thorn tree had a mind to him, 
When into the woods he came. 

" Out of the woods my Master went, 
And he was well content. 
Out of the woods my Master came, 
Content with death and shame. 
When death and shame would woo him last, 
From under the trees they drew him last, 
^Twas on a tree they slew him — last 
When out of the woods he came" 

Closely conne&ed with all this is the third thing 
I want to say: Cultivate the companionship of 
God. This takes us to the ultimate source of all 
life and all power. The history of the world is 
chiefly the record of what men have thought and 
felt concerning God. The idea which lay at the 
root of the ancient family and the ancient state 
was the idea of God. The priest was more power- 



THE FACE OF <AN EAQLE 105 

fid than the warrior or the king. The great epics, 
the great cathedrals, the great works of art, have 
sprung from a sense of God; and so have great 
discoveries and most of the great movements 
among mankind. The ruling idea of Columbus 
in undertaking his epoch-making voyage was to 
extend the power of the Church. When armies 
partake of the sacrament, as they did on the field 
of Crecy, or when men enter battle singing 
psalms, like Cromwell's soldiers, or when a gen- 
eral turns aside to pray, as Washington did, we 
may know that great deeds will be done. Luther's 
hymn, "A mighty fortress is our God," rolled 
through Germany with an overcoming power 
that was not of this world. The most widely sung 
hymn to-day — used by Catholics as well as Pro- 
testants — is, "Nearer, my God, to thee." "All 
philosophy," said Plato, "is a search for God." 
The history of a nation and the story of an in- 
dividual life are alike in this : they show that with 
a sense of God come strength and the fulfilment 
of noble ends ; without it, failure and ruin. The 
French nation at one time said there was no God; 
then came the Reign of Terror. When a man 
turns God out of his life, he silences life's har- 
monies, and, like Shakespeare's man that has no 
music in his soul, 

"Is fit for treason, stratagems and spoils." 

Men at various times have had strange notions 
about God; they have made him an arbitrary 
lawgiver, a tyrant, a bargain-maker, a being that 



106 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

would trade off benefits for praise and sacrifice. 
We know now that He is none of these; He is 
our Father and cares for us more tenderly than 
earthly parents for their children. 

We have learned to some extent who God is; 
but have we learned equally well where God is? 
Perhaps you think of Him as far away; beyond 
the stars, perhaps; in some vague place called 
heaven, perhaps. That is not what Paul told the 
Athenians ; he told them that God was not far 
from any one of them. Suppose He were in the 
room where you sit; suppose He were close by 
your side. The apostle put it more emphatically 
than this; he said that in God we live and move 
and have our being. God made the world and all 
that in it is ; and it requires His constant presence 
and attention to sustain what He has made; if for 
one moment He should withdraw, this wonderful 
fabric of the world would fall to ruins. Every time 
you look upon the light, or the beauty of a lily, 
or hear a tree rustle, or a brook murmur, or a bird 
sing; yea, every time you feel your hand move, 
or your head turn — you have sufficient evidence 
that He is not far. 

" The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the 
plains — 
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns? 

" Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit 
can meet — 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and 
feet. 



THE FACE OF dN EAQLE 107 

"And the ear of man cannot hear^ and the eye of man can- 
not Sec ; 
But if we could see and hear, this Vision — were it not 
He?" 

And still perhaps you are saying, "Yes, but if 
only I could see God as I see my friend. " That 
is just what Philip yearned for when he said to 
Jesus, "Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us." 
But has it never occurred to you in what way 
you see vour friend? You have never seen him 
with your mortal eye. You see what you are 
pleased to call his body, the expression of his 
face, the motion of his hand, the nod of his head ; 
these are all external things — mere instruments 
which your friend uses; himself you do not see. 
You see him only with the eye of the spirit; you 
know him because "spirit with spirit can meet." 
That is the only way we ever see and know one 
another. And that is precisely the way we may 
see and know God. 

We may go a step farther. When you see a 
good deed done, are you quite sure that you 
know T who does it? You say your friend, because 
you saw his hands perform the deed. But are you 
sure that you saw all? Paul said that the human 
body is the temple, that is, the dwelling place 
of the Spirit of God. The good deed is not from 
your friend alone, but from God himself work- 
ing in and through the spirit and body of your 
friend. Every good deed, every ad of moral cour- 
age, or of self-control, or of generosity, every kind 
and thoughtful word, even 7 look of sympathy, 



108 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

no matter who the person is, should fill us with 
awe: God is there. Goodness is the one awful 
thing in all this world. Goodness is God-ness. 
And as to our own selves, if we will cease put- 
ting up barriers against God, who is always press- 
ing for fuller entrance into our lives; if we will 
become unselfish and true and helpful and kind, 
then, so far forth — and the thought is startling 
— shall we be able to say in some real sense, 
"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." 
If only our hearing were a little keener and our 
vision a little clearer, we should, as Mr. Ruskin 
says, be forever uncovering our heads in rever- 
ence, and putting off our shoes, because of holy 
ground. When one cultivates his sense of God, 
he soon finds the commonplace things of earth 
taking on for him the glory of heaven. 



LOSINQ tANT) FINTtlNQ 




E have been considering some of 
the great qualities that enter into 
every true and useful life. Sym- 
pathyputs us in touch with other 
people and fosters the helpful 
spirit; that is the face of a man. 
Courage is required for making 
sympathy available in a&s of service, or for mak- 
ing available any other good qualities or powers 
we possess ; that is the face of a lion. Patience 
and perseverance in the task we undertake will 
carry us through to the right result ; that is the 
face of an ox. Aspiration gives us a goal among 
the higher things and enables us to replenish 
our strength from day to day at the sources of 
power; that is the face of an eagle. 

We now come to a trait or quality that should 
pervade all the others and in a sense unite them. 
It has been implied all along. We may call it 
disinterestedness, though the name is somewhat 
misleading. Disinterestedness does not mean lack 
of interest: it means lack of selfish interest; it 
means being dead to the lower motives and alive 
to the higher ones. When we possess this quality, 
our ultimate objed: is not money, or pleasure, or 
reputation, or praise, or appreciation ; we will do 



no THE LIFE TH<AT COUNTS 

our duty, we will render our service, whether 
any one thanks us for it or not, or even whether 
any one knows about it or not ; we will do it at 
whatever cost. The real reward — for real reward 
there is — lies absolutely and altogether above 
the market line ; it is something that cannot be 
bought and sold; it is not, therefore, transferable; 
it inheres in the service itself; no man can tear 
them asunder; there is no power in heaven or 
earth to keep the doer of disinterested service 
from the reward that goes with it — the only re- 
ward worth caring for in the last result. 

Two of the things oftenest and most intimately 
associated with service of every kind are money 
and glory in its various forms. As motives or as 
results of what men do they have played a mighty 
part in the history of the world and of individ- 
ual lives. Make either of them your ultimate goal 
and you may or may not achieve it; but certainly 
you will achieve nothing more; you have stopped 
too soon in the scale of values and forfeited your 
chance of reaching the highest and best of all. 
Let them come to you, however, as the result 
of good work done, and you may gladly receive 
them as an aid for doing more good work in the 
dire&ion of your ideal; you shall not allow them 
to take the place of that ideal. How far they are 
motives for any particular service — philanthropic 
work, for instance — it is perhaps impossible to 
know, until we know whether or not the service 
would cease by their withdrawal. Let us briefly 
consider each of these two things, in order that 



LOSINQ *AND FINTHNQ in 

we may assess them at their true value and pass 
beyond them to values of a higher kind. 

First, as to money. That some money is neces- 
sary and should be sought for, nobody questions. 
That great wealth may be turned to great uses 
is equally evident. We shall nowhere find more 
devoted servants of the ideal than in some of the 
world's rich men. We must not underestimate 
what money can do and has done. At the same 
time we must not overestimate it. It is amazing 
what has been accomplished without money, or 
without much of it. Most of the great achieve- 
ments in art, literature, science, discovery, po- 
litical freedom, religious toleration, and moral 
reform have been the work of poor men. The 
world is indebted, not to Croesus, but to So- 
crates; not to the money-changers in the Temple, 
but to Jesus; not to the plunderers of provinces, 
but to Paul ; and so on through the ages. 

And it is well to be reminded in this com- 
mercial age that the power of money has its 
limits. Let an American millionaire go to Dres- 
den and ask what the Sistine Madonna is worth; 
he will be told that the Sistine Madonna is not 
for sale. " But suppose it were for sale," he in- 
sists, "what would the price be? Is it worth half 
a million dollars?" "Yes," we may imagine some 
one as saying in reply, "it is worth half a million 
dollars; it is worth ten million dollars; it is worth 
what any one chooses to pay and the owner is 
willing to accept. There is but one Sistine Ma- 
donna in the world and there will never be an- 



ii2 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

other. We have cornered the market in Sistine 
Madonnas for all time, and can make the price 
all the gold and silver in the world as easily as 
make it half a million dollars. The fad: is we 
have taken the picture out of the class of mar- 
ketable things and there is simply no price about 
it. You may look at it and enjoy it as much and 
as long as you wish, but as for buying it, that is 
out of the question." 

Such an answer is full of light. You may look 
at a star and enjoy its beauty if you have the 
eyes, but you cannot buy the star. Men can buy 
a vast deal less than they think they can. Look 
at the hill or the mountain or the sweep of 
meadow land which your neighbor owns and 
holds at so much an acre; you, with your finer 
appreciation, may get more from it than he does'; 
there is something there which his title deeds 
do not cover; beauty is not for sale; that is as 
much yours as your neighbor's; it is his who 
has the eyes to see it. And truth is not for sale. 
And righteousness is not for sale. It is remark- 
able that the best things, the really desirable 
things, are never mentioned in the same breath 
with money; they cannot be gotten for gold; 
the price of them is beyond the price of rubies ; 
they belong in another realm of values; they are 
without money and without price because of 
their incalculable worth. 

And yet they may be had; they are freely 
bestowed on him who is worthy to receive them, 
and on nobody else. You give your resped or 



LOSINQ trfND FINT>INg 113 

your friendship to the person you consider worthy 
of it; you do not sell it, you give it. Why a per- 
son should give anything away or do anything 
for nothing is precisely what a sordid mind is 
least able to understand. Some people see, or 
try desperately hard to see, a selfish motive be- 
hind every a£t of other people ; they are always 
suspicious; if a man unites with the church, it 
is in order to help his business or his social posi- 
tion; if he subscribes generously to public chari- 
ties, it means that he takes that method of ad- 
vertising; if he performs an ad: of neighborly 
kindness, it must be that he has an axe to grind 
somewhere. Minds that are soaked with money 
values and have no ideals outside the commer- 
cial realm utterly fail to comprehend the mean- 
ing, or even to discover, the existence of disinter- 
ested service. When Satan asked, with a gleeful 
sneer at Job's righteousness, cc Does Job serve 
God for nothing?" he did not dream that the 
answer would be what it was: "Yes, Job serves 
God for nothing; he does not serve him for the 
flocks and herds and worldly prosperity which 
you think such service brings ; he will serve him 
in adversity just the same; Job serves God for 
nothing." That is what the Book of Job was 
written to say and explain. 

And that is the chara&er of all true service 
everywhere; as the world counts values, it must 
be for nothing. The physician, minister, teacher, 
every honest worker in any station in life, so far 
as he is true to himself and his calling, feels a 



n 4 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

deeper interest in his work than the mere money 
return connected with it could possibly arouse. 
He would do the same work, or some other 
equally useful, — provided he were given the 
means to live and do it with, — if all fees and 
all salaries were swept away. The compensation 
lies in the service itself. Schliemann, the stu- 
dent of Greek archaeology, made his fortune as a 
business man and then devoted it to the increase 
of knowledge. Not long ago a young million- 
aire was ordained to the Christian ministry; it 
was not a question of money, but of service. 
There are college faculties in which rich men and 
poor men work side by side in the great cause 
of education. " I have n't time to make money," 
said the noble-minded Agassiz. 

We can well afford to lose what lies below us in 
the zone of marketable things if we may thereby 
obtain what lies above us in the zone of noble 
things. "Why should I do anything for those 
people? " said a rich man to an agent of the chari- 
ties; "they have never done anything for me." 
"True," replied the agent," they have never done 
anything for you; but if you do something for 
them, it will make you more like God. It is for 
you to decide whether that will be worth your 
while. What God does He does for nothing." And 
so it is always a question of becoming like God, 
of sharing His life of disinterested service, of en- 
tering into fellowship with Him. Self-sacrifice is 
the great word which Christianity gave the world ; 
but self-sacrifice does not mean self-effacement; 



LOSINQ <AND FINT>INQ 115 

it means, rather, self-enlargement, a losing of 
one's self in one's work, in one's duty, in the life 
of God — a surrender of the smaller for the larger 
self. And in that you find the reward for disin- 
terested service — a reward that money cannot 
buy. 

And now as to glory. Appreciation, recogni- 
tion, praise, popularity, notoriety, fame — all 
this is pleasant, none of it is necessary; the 
greater minds think little about it. But some 
persons can no more work without praise than 
an opium-eater can live without his drug, or an 
inebriate without his dram. Even St. Simeon 
Stylites, as portrayed by Tennyson, could not 
get along without the admiration of men; he was 
one of those persons whose pride happens to take 
the form of humility, — a humility that has no 
value to them as a private possession, but only 
as a public spe&acle. This kind of self-conscious- 
ness is one of the subtlest forms that selfishness 
can assume. The love of glory is a multifarious 
and omniverous beast; it takes on whatever form 
will best enable it to overcome the viftim it pur- 
sues, whether that viftim be the ruler of an em- 
pire or an occupant of the poets' corner in some 
country weekly. It captures some persons only 
in part; others it devours, as it did Napoleon, 
body and soul. Not infrequently it triumphs 
where the love of money utterly fails. A man will 
give a fortune to endow a college provided the 
college may bear his name ; or he will toil unre- 
mittingly for others provided his good deeds are 



n6 THE LIFE THJlT COUNTS 

blazoned before the world ; or he will even face 
danger and death if only he can be enrolled 
among the heroes or martyrs of the land. The 
test question is whether you would be willing to 
sacrifice in a good cause if you felt sure the sa- 
crifice would never be known. Enoch Arden, in 
Tennyson's poem, reveals the greatness of his 
character by the way he answers that question. 

The trouble with Benedict Arnold was that 
he could not meet a test of this kind. He had 
labored and suffered for his country with the ut- 
most willingness, but when he felt that his work 
was not appreciated he gave it up in disgust and 
became a traitor. He valued the recognition of 
the good he had done more than he valued the 
good itself. Unlike Washington, he had never 
lost himself in the great cause, and his vanity 
got the better of his patriotism. But the test has 
difficulties even for true patriots. At the close of 
our recent war with Spain, there rose a contro- 
versy of great bitterness between the friends of 
two officers of the navy. The question at issue 
was the right apportionment of glory for the 
victory at Santiago. It would have been nobler if 
both the admirals had said, " I care not who gets 
the glory if only my country got the service." 

To strive after glory is to strive after the sha- 
dow and let the substance go. It is said that in all 
of Wellington's dispatches you never meet with 
the word "glory;" it is always "duty." In Na- 
poleon's you never meet with the word " duty ; " 
it is always "glory." Waterloo was a clash be- 



LOSINQ ^ND FINTUNQ 117 

tween duty and glory, and duty won, as in the 
end it always must. 

The desire to become conspicuous, to be 
pointed out, to stand among the few, has led 
men at times to stop at nothing. Notoriety was 
the sole motive of Herostratus in destroying by 
fire the great temple of Diana. He preferred any- 
thing to oblivion — even contempt. The man 
who is talked against and persecuted for what he 
thinks and does in obedience to his conscience, 
and who nevertheless holds bravely on his way, 
is generally cited as the noblest embodiment of 
heroic condudt. But there is something which re- 
quires a greater courage, sometimes, and a finer 
quality of heroism in the soul, and that is the 
willingness to belong to the many, to be lost sight 
of, to work on in a quiet and unobtrusive way 
without recognition, or the expectation of it, from 
any source. The names of our noblest heroes and 
heroines are not written in the records of this 
world. Such is the significance of Sill's poem en- 
titled "Dare You?" 

"Doubting Thomas and loving John, 
Behind the others walking on : — 

" c Tell me now, John, dare you be 
One of the minority? 
To be lonely in your thought, 
Never visited nor sought, 
Shunned with secret shrug, to go 
Through the world esteemed its foe; 
To be singled out and hissed, 
Pointed at as one unblessed, 



n8 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

Warred against in whispers faint , 
Lest the children catch a taint ; 
To bear off your titles well, — 
Heretic and infidel? 
If you dare, come now with me. 
Fearless, confident and free? 

u * Thomas, do you dare to be 
Of the great majority ? 
To be only as the rest, 
With Heaven's common comforts blessed; 
To accept, in humble part, 
Truth that shines on every heart ; 
Never to be set on high, 
Where the envious curses fly ; 
Never name or fame to find, 
Still outstripped in soul and mind; 
To be hid, unless to God, 
As one grass-blade in the sod, 
Underfoot with millions trod? 
If you dare, come with us, be 
Lost in love's great unity? " 

Self-consciousness obtrudes itself into what we 
do every day of our lives. But when we think of 
the impression we are making instead of the ser- 
vice we are rendering, we never quite lose our- 
selves in our work. This is a form of vanity, 
though we seldom recognize it as such and would 
feel horrified to be classed with vain persons. 
M. Perrichon, in the little French play, wanted 
a pidure of Mont Blanc. The artist painted the 
mountain in the background and M. Perrichon 
in the foreground, so that the man quite over- 
shadowed the mountain. But M. Perrichon was 



LOSINQ *AND FINTHNQ 119 

greatly pleased; and we all are pleased — foolish 
people that we are! — when we can centre atten- 
tion on ourselves instead of on something greater 
than ourselves. 

There is an old mediaeval story which was pub- 
lished many years ago in a book of poems called 
"Monastic Legends. " It tells how seven holy 
men resolved to dedicate their lives to God's ser- 
vice. They took for their chapel a lonely glade of 
the forest. But they had one grief: they were old 
and not able to sing well. Their abbot, therefore, 
gave them leave to say their chants and hymns 
instead of singing them. God would accept their 
service, the abbot said, if they did as well as they 
could. But one of their hymns, the Magnificat, 
the abbot positively excepted; this they must try 
to chant. 

" So every day, at vesper time, Magnificat was heard; 
^T is said that from the boughs above it frightened every 

bird. 
For all were out of tune, and each a different chant did 

try; 
But up in heaven, where hearts are known, it made 

sweet melody" 

They kept this up, day after day, until one 
Christmas Eve there came among them a young 
stranger with a most beautiful voice. The old 
monks were charmed with his singing, and they 
got him to sing for them the famous chant. 

" And each one in his heart exclaimed, i Thank God that on 
this night 



120 THE LIFE TH^T COUNTS 

One is among us who can sing Magnificat aright' 
But had they marked the stranger's face and seen how 

all his thought 
Was on his own melodious voice — how self was all he 

sought — 
They would have known that up in heaven that voice 

was never heard; 
For, though the birds came flying back, Christ could not 

hear a word" 

At the close of the service an angel appeared and 
demanded why no praise had been offered "on 
that night so blest." This opened the eyes of 
the monks; they were alarmed, and sent the "me- 
lodious stranger" away. 

" Then, bursting forth into the chant it was their wont to 

sing, 
High up in heaven their hymn of praise with fervent 

heart they fling, 
And the angel bare it on with him to heaven s Lord and 

King: 9 

When people came out of church after listening 
to a certain noted preacher, they used to say to 
one another, "What a fine discourse!" but after 
hearing Beecher the remark was, "How true that 
is!" The greater the preacher the more he with- 
draws from sight in order that his truth may 
occupy the field of view. Many an oration, rich 
in ideas, finished in style, splendid in rhetoric, 
but filled with the self-consciousness of the ora- 
tor, has been listened to and forgotten; but the 
brief Gettysburg address of Abraham Lincoln, 
written in pencil on the cars and given with no 



LOSINg ^ND FIN<DINQ 121 

thought of anything but the truth it contained, 
has passed into the living memory of men. 

In speaking of Lincoln — and how often we 
find ourselves turning to the life of that great 
man for examples of moral power — we are re- 
minded of one of the noblest instances of self- 
forgetfulness the world has ever seen. Just be- 
fore his second ele&ion he had reason to believe 
that he might be defeated at the polls and obliged 
to yield his office to another man. This would 
not only mean ingratitude and injustice to him- 
self on the part of his countrymen, but, as the 
war was still in progress, would involve grave 
danger to the country itself. Many a man, under 
such circumstances, would have felt like taking 
a secret delight in the evils that would follow his 
own defeat. Not so Abraham Lincoln. Be it said 
to his immortal honor that he took deliberate 
steps to make everything easy for his successor; 
he prepared to cooperate with him and contribute 
to the success of the new administration. Think 
what that meant. The more the new administra- 
tion succeeded, the more it would look as if Lin- 
coln's had been a failure; and Lincoln, knowing 
all that, was nevertheless willing to sacrifice him- 
self for the sake of the land he loved. 

It is difficult to speak of disinterestedness in 
service without recalling one more name, that of 
the man of old who came out of the wilderness 
preaching righteousness to the world. Though 
immense throngs flocked to hear John the Bap- 
tist, and everybody talked of his power, they 



122 THE LIFE THJtT COUNTS 

found him the most humble and most self-for- 
getful of men. He called himself a voice, that is, 
a sound, a ripple of air, that vibrates a moment 
and then dies into utter silence. When Another 
came who could do the work better, he directed 
his own disciples to that Other, and was willing 
to step aside and be forgotten. He showed no 
tinge of jealousy ; he had no desire for glory; his 
unselfish aim was the prosperity of the work of 
God. "With what sublime repression of him- 
self" he turned all eyes to the Son of Man, say- 
ing, "He must increase; I must decrease." Just 
before dawn the morning star hangs large and 
beautiful in the eastern sky; then it begins to 
fade. At last it is gone — sunk so quietly away 
that you would never know it had been there. 
The sun fills all the world. It was so with John, 
the herald of the kingdom; he was not the sun; 
he was not that light; he was sent to bear wit- 
ness of the light. His work over, he passed out 
of view, losing his life in the larger life. And that 
is why Jesus could say that there had not risen 
a greater than John the Baptist. 

There are perhaps a dozen names in history 
to which custom has attached the word " Great." 
Touch thatwordwith your finger and it crumbles 
into dust. The men who bear it, most of them at 
least, were self-seeking men, thinking and caring 
chiefly for themselves. Frederick the Great did 
not care so much for Christianity or for Ger- 
many as he cared for Frederick ; he wanted to be 
the centre of things. Napoleon the Great was 



LOSINQ <AND FINTHNQ 123 

always talking about his star and his destiny ; he 
wanted to be the centre of things. These men 
never learned that greatness — the greatness that 
stands the wear and tear of time — lies not in 
self-assertion, but in self-surrender to what is 
greater than ourselves. 

One of the paintings oftenest met with in Eu- 
ropean galleries is that of Napoleon arrayed in 
his imperial robes, with a sceptre in his hand and 
a crown of leaves on his head. Place beside it in 
imagination the portrait of a man clothed in rai- 
ment of camel's hair, with a leathern girdle about 
his loins. The man from the wilderness seems to 
suffer from comparison with the man of power 
and pomp. But if we look a moment longer, if 
we view the portraits while the light of history 
falls upon them and while the final standard of 
all judgment is applied, we notice a change. It 
is in their lives and their motives that the two 
men stand contrasted now. The sole obje6l of 
one was self-aggrandizement; he would build a 
world empire and found a dynasty ; to that end 
he left no stone unturned, sacrificing everything 
— family ties, the lives of his fellow men, even 
conscience itself. And of all that he strove for, 
and at one time thought he had almost achieved, 
absolutely nothing remains; the robe and the 
sceptre and the crown in the pi&ure drop away ; 
we see only the charafter of the man. "He that 
seeketh his life shall lose it." The objed of the 
other man was not self, but service; he gave even 
his life for the kingdom of righteousness; and 



124 THE LIFE TH^fT COUNTS 

the cause for which he stood, the cause with 
which he will always be identified, has remained 
and increased and been established on enduring 
foundations. His portrait becomes transfigured 
before us, and we remember those other words, 
" He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." 

It is a great thing to be able to sink yourself 
out of sight in the service you render, in the good 
you do, in the truth you speak. When a person 
does that, he shares in a life that is as large as all 
service, and all good, and all truth. Because he 
seeks no reward, the reward is always with him. 
The reward of a good life is the good life itself. 
All it asks is that it may continue to be the good 
life. It needs no other glory. 

The life of earnest and disinterested service, 
that finds its joy in its work, is what Tennyson 
describes in some memorable lines as indepen- 
dent of perishable human praise; he sums up, 
indeed, in the one word "Virtue" what we have 
been calling the life that counts: 

"Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song, 

Paid with a breath flying by to be lost on an endless sea; 
Glory of Virtue , to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong — 
Nay, but she aimed not at glory, no lover of glory she : 
Give her the glory of going on, and still to be" 

THE ENT> 



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